Andrew, to clarify:

I think her poetry is very poor. That's pretty much the sum of my opinion on the matter. I don't understand why this is a controversial opinion. That it's hugely popular is of little interest to me. People like bad art. I have no agenda, no jealousy, no axe to grind. You won't find anyone on this site with fewer expectations or experience of the 'po-biz' than me. There was no 'subtext' in my choice of the Hicks quote. It was all text. I'm not sure what subtext you're alluding to. That I'm undermining and insulting her fans by suggesting the poetry isn't very good? By that logic nobody would be able to give their unvarnished opinion on anything.

I don't really understand a lot of your second paragraph but towards the end you seem to be suggesting that criticism of her work is down to jealousy because she's a big 'seller'. It isn't. It's because the poetry isn't very good. I don't understand the point of 'countering' that 'dynamic'.

If her readers go on to write their own poetry and some of it is truly good, then great. I don't really care. I don't necessarily think the world needs more poetry.

No, not at all, regarding you and jealousy. It never occurred to me that you would be that sort of person. You don't read that way from here. I was refering to string of posts over the years that always seem tinged with hatred of the latest award winner. I was suggesting this might incline me to playing the target's advocate. I am afraid that is all I can muster on this one. A vague defensiveness for the poet, a strong faith in groups of millenials, and a consistent hatred for Elliot. I did what I could with what I had. My job is done here. Best posts were Julie's and Walter's if we are voting.

Andrew,

Ha. My job is done also. Thanks for the back and forth. I enjoyed it, even if nobody else did. ;)

Susan,

Yes, I don't disagree with anything you said. Cheers. And genuinely I wish good luck to Rupi Kaur! She seems very nice!

(Mark, you did say you liked her doodles.)

Mark,

Though it is only an aside and of no consequence, I am of a mind to let you know that I fancied your invocation of that Bill Hicks bit*; it well accentuated the point you were then making. I think it equally ad rem and entertaining at once.

I noticed that I liked the piece of this day at Rattle by a Post-Millennial, one Tonee Ales, over anything I have hitherto read by Rupi Kaur; the former has not been alive above seven years. I could not suffer to let my final comment repose upon a reference to some work that I personally dislike.
I sign off.
Cheers!


* It so happens I am partial to that part of standup which provokes thought as well as mirth, and I was delighted to see this ideal union of tendencies so nicely incarnated.

Jim,

Yes, I really like her drawings, they're totally charming. And I like her sentiments too, I suppose. There's just no getting around the fact that the writing isn't very good. But that's ok. When I read about her, before I read her, I think I expected it to be better. Edgier somehow, at least, or with more meat on the bones about her personal experiences. Admittedly I've only read the 12 poems I found online that were deemed to be her best. Maybe the writer of that blog made poor choices and there is much more to her. But, as Susan said, nobody is harmed from reading her, she's 'feelgood' and inoffensive.

Edit: Cheers Erik, we Cross posted. What piece at Rattle? Did you link to it?

Edit edit: I read it. 'I Hear Laughing'. Very sweet. And they call me a cynic! ;)

Here's one of her poems.
Maybe she anticipated this thread...;)

'what terrifies me most is how we
foam at the mouth with envy
when others succeed
but sigh in relief
when they are failing

our struggle to
celebrate each other is
what's proven most difficult
in being human'

Mark, I agree that the dozen poems you saw are not particularly edgy. This poem near the beginning of Milk and Honey probably doesn't look very edgy to you, either:

But in the context of the poems surrounding it, it slices me to the bone.

Rather than paraphrase that context, I think I should let Kaur tell her own story in Milk and Honey itself. But here's some of my personal story, which is similar enough to Kaur's in certain ways that I hope it will explain why I find the poem so devastating.

For the three years that I was ages five to seven, approximately, my sexual abusers threatened to kill me and/or my loved ones if I told anyone what they were doing to me. Their determination to silence me is unsurprising, since they wanted to get away with criminal behavior.

What might surprise you is how vehemently I was silenced by everyone to whom I tried to turn for help. They either:

a.) failed to understand a young child's circumlocutory efforts to find a way to report and escape things that she had solemnly sworn not to tell, under pain of death to herself and her loved ones; or

b.) decided that I must be telling outrageous lies about trusted adults in order to deflect blame for my own hypersexuality and acting-out with other children--which, BTW, are textbook symptoms of childhood sexual abuse; or

c.) feared the severe social repercussions that would come to me and to our family, if community gossip linked me to sexual impropriety.

I've written quite a few poems about c.)--a situation with some parallels to the Catholic Church's secretive handling of the clergy pedophilia scandal. I see the stigma-avoidance of c.) in this Kaur poem, too.

I imagine the poem as addressed to her parents, or perhaps just her mother. And I picture the narrator not only as a child bearing a secret that must be kept from the virginity-obsessed culture in which she lives, if she is to have any hope of marrying within it someday...but also as a poet struggling to find her voice.

As a poet, I've spent a lot of energy alternately self-censoring my childhood and trying to find effective ways to break my silence about it. When I consider writing about it, I fear that no one will understand or believe what I'm trying to communicate anyway, or that critics will (intentionally or unintentionally) stomp on my heart if I make myself too vulnerable.

These are well-founded fears. I've been told repeatedly (in various degrees of patience and politeness) certain "shock value" topics are a sensational, melodramatic clichés to be avoided. On the other hand, when I try to follow Dickinson's advice to "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," my poems end up "telling it slant" to such a degree that no one can figure out what I'm alluding to at all. So then, in frustration, I steer clear of the daunting subject entirely for long stretches of time, and silence rules again.

Where certain topics are concerned, there seems to be no middle ground between too sensational and too coy.

But I think Rupi Kaur miraculously got it just right, with this simple, childlike expression.

And she makes this achievement seem effortless.

Or artless, some would complain. She didn't finesse the experience into a villanelle or a sonnet. She didn't use meter or rhyme. In fact, she utterly failed to employ any literary devices whatsoever--not even alliteration.

But if this explosive little poem, which perfectly expresses something I've tried for years to express, is bad poetry, then I honestly hope that I can someday produce something this lousy.

Hi Julie,

I understand exactly what you're saying and your description of your experience is heartbreaking and horrific and your reponse to Kaur's poem unarguable. I'm so sorry. I feel I probably came across as churlish in some of my posts. (Sorry Andrew, if I did) I regret the Bill Hicks quote really, only because it can be interpreted as me saying her poetry is 'shit'. I would never suggest sonething so blunt and rude. The choice of this quote was more that it seemed to parallel the way that most discussion of Kaur is about her background, the unique medium by which the poetry has been disseminated, her readership etc, while the actual quality of the work is, if not quite an elephant in the room, certainly underdiscussed. Or if it is criticised the criticism is seen as somehow reflective of the prejudices of the critic rather than as honest objective criticism. I've repeatedly said in my posts on this thread that I think people are getting something genuine and valuable from her poems and that the experience isn't a shallow one. My objection isn't about her simplicity or choice of form either. I don't think for a moment her poems would be better as villanelles or sonnets. I like free verse. I like simplicity. Nor is it about her subject matter. I certainly don't agree with critics who have told you in the past that certain subjects are taboo and will be considered sensational, or gauche or melodramatic. I don't have any of the fashionable prejudice against 'confessional' poetry; half of my own poems are basically me self-indulgently raking up my past. For me Kaur's poetry just doesn't do it because it tips too often beyond heart-on-sleeve simplicity and into a cliched inspirational feel-good fuzziness that leaves me cold. I hope this honest opinion doesn't render me heartless or elitist, because I'm sure I'm neither.

All the best. I'm very happy to see you back here btw.

Mark

Mark and Julie, thanks for continuing this discussion.
I've been spun into a quandary. Remorse is a painful thing. I'm impugning my own harsh assessment of what is or is not meaningful poetry. I can't help myself it seems. I do it every time.

On the other side now, finally, I feel like a small epiphany has come over me as this discussion takes a turn. It's not something I can articulate at the moment. Or maybe never will. It has to do with a poem finding it's audience and vice versa. I'm at least glad to have this opportunity to revise my thinking. Candy. Bouillabaisse. No. Good poetry is the alchemy of both steeped in context.

To take Julie's example:

you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too

and broadening it's meaning by placing it in the context of the other poems that surround it is profound. It means that the collection of poems in Milk and Honey are really one poem.

Mark, I admire your approach to writing poetry and think you often unearth meaning and insight by your dogged digging. And your criticism is offered in the same fashion IMO. You are digging still, here, on Kaur's poetry.

Julie, your perspective strikes me at my core (to paraphrase your words on what Kaur's poem above did to you). Thanks for relating your own experiences to it so that I can see. You are a poet that has had that very effect with your own poetry on me.

Genuine is the best word I can come up with at the moment. Be genuine. The rest is less important.

Andrew M.'s daughter would know.

Goodness, I just found this on YouTube. I'm going to leave my last word on the subject to this very articulate young woman, who is basically saying everything I've been trying to say but better. Perhaps it will be more palatable to people coming from a female millennial, rather than a 45 year old bloke.

https://youtu.be/a8kwg7pcTn8

But this review is ducks in a barrel. What is wrong with the book isn't nearly as interesting or as challenging to art as what is powerful in the book. (see post 48). The reviews depends on a subtext that anything being experienced by readers is only due to their shallow experiences having never stumbled across real poetry or feminist ideas before. I think things are stranger than that. The bits of poetry, and I admit it is sparse to my eyes, reminds me of Rumi run through a totally different body, time, and experience outside of literature, immersed in the muck of the present market/social medium/bleck. Yeah, it is a bag of ten cliches retooled and pressed into service, sometimes awkwardly. Ok. But it isn't "nothing but"...

And it isn't that I don't see what you are saying, or what that Cut article was poking fun at. I just find rooting for rather than against her more interesting.

Mark, I thought that video review was pretty articulate. It reminded me of my students' reactions to being offered texts that fail to interest them, except that many students are less full and nuanced in their opinion.
There is obviously no need for students to like a text just because I tell them it mattered to me, or to anybody else for that matter.

Cheers,
John

If we allow ourselves to get too subjective in our responses to poetry, we can end up "shaming" others for their lack of sensitivity. In the four-line poem quoted above, Rupi Kaur has written something like Blake's "A Poison Tree," but without any metaphor.

you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too

This is not poetry but maxim. As a maxim it's not bad, but the "i decided" puts the pairs of lines in "so/that" or cause-effect relationship. Is "afraid" repeated in the same sense or in two different ones? Rhetorically, it's an interesting saying, but its ultimate meaning (the cause of the fear) has to be filled in by the reader.

When she ventures into metaphor, she is on less certain "ground."

there are mountains growing
beneath our feet
that cannot be contained
all we've endured
has prepared us for this
bring your hammers and fists
we have a glass ceiling to shatter -
let's leave this place roofless

I'm not sure how many stanzas the original contains, so I've printed it as a single stanza.

The mountains have to be metaphorical because literal mountains do not grow; if they do anything, the erode and grow smaller. The vagueness of "this," which seems to refer to that which "cannot be contained" is very vague. Now, into this outdoor mountain scene, the readers are encouraged to bring "hammers and fists" to break a "glass ceiling." This is a metaphorical jumble, which often happens when a cliched metaphor like "glass ceiling" is used. It would be like saying, "That's just water under the bridge to irrigate the crops." Cliched metaphors are easily mixed.

If we don't lean on it too hard, we get the gist of the message: "Things are changing (for women). We must add our own efforts to the struggle for advancement." Why "women"? Well, "glass ceiling" is a trope that is gender-based, and Kaur's audience seems primarily young women.

Julie, I had read only the twelve poems of Kaur's that Mark had linked to. I like better the one you quoted; though it doesn't have as powerful an effect on me as it does on you, it strikes me as being a true insight stated in words that everyone can understand. And when I say that her poems lack artistry, I don't mean that they would have to be sonnets or villanelles to impress me. I am very impressed by Linda Pastan's work, for instance, which also is very direct and plainspoken. Looking at a few of her poems on the Poetry Foundation web site, I came across this series on the Seven Deadly Sins:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ssue=1&page=24

It does assume that the reader knows a little about the concept of the seven deadly sins, but I think most people could still understand the poems quite easily and yet I find them to be very artful.

No one can dictate someone else's tastes. Poetry really is "whatever works for you." I'm just explaining my own tastes.

Susan

Andrew,

'Just when I thought I was out' etc. I think I've said at least three times during the course of my posts that I wish her well, that I don't begrudge her success, that I understand that people are getting something genuinely meaningful from her. So in that sense I am rooting for her as much as you.

I haven't read the Cut article you refer to. I haven't read any of the reviews of her, apart from watching this YouTube video. I don't understand what you mean by 'ducks in a barrel'. It seemed like a completely sincere, unaffected, articulate review by someone who is in Kaur's key readership demographic: an intelligent, non-poetry reading young woman. And she didn't like it. For similar reasons that I don't much like it.

I also don't get the idea of rooting for or against her as being a position one has to take, one of which is more 'interesting' than the other. The only position I can take is one of artistic and aesthetic honesty. And I just don't think she's a very good writer. I'm exhausted now with trying to articulate what seems to me to be a very simple uncontroversial opinion.

Edit: cross posted with John, Susan and Sam. I'm definitely done now. (Maybe). Cheers.

Hey Mark.
I think you read me as coming after you for your dislike of her work, of wanting to get you to say its good. Not at all. I completely understand your take. I don't think you, or the blogger (who I have listened to on something else but can't recall) have any artistic or moral failings or lacking sensitivity. I just feel differently about it (and her words...and Elliot...and Hicks...and)

To maybe help Mark articulate his thoughts, at the risk of reading them totally wrong, I will point out that there are many, many Instagram poets who write exactly like Kaur. Her talents are not in literature but in marketing, in which she is kind of ingenious; literature is one of the three media by which she markets herself, the other two being her doodles and her Instagram posts. Since all of us here are interested in literature, we are speaking mainly of her poems, but I think to criticize her poems as if they were literature, instead of merely medium, is to miss their point rather spectacularly.

Maybe it is like a calligrapher who writes dreadful poems not because he cares about poetry, but because he needs something to write to show off his calligraphy. Kaur is a social media presence--that is her art form--and the poems are a means to that presence. The presence is the point, not the poetry.

I'm now curious as to your views of the origin of mountains.

Orwn: "Maybe it is like a calligrapher who writes dreadful poems not because he cares about poetry, but because he needs something to write to show off his calligraphy."

The Alcazar in Seville has two sets of mural calligraphy: that predating the Reconquista, which is verses from the Koran, and that postdating it, done by Mozarabic artists who spoke no Arabic. It is gibberish. Both, to those who don't read Arabic, are of equal beauty.

Cheers,
John

Walter,

Thank you. I do understand all that perfectly well. And as a social media phenomenon she's spectacular. But everyone on this thread, not just me, has been discussing the merits of her printed book of poems: their worth or their potential as a catalyst for poetic expression in her readership. So really you agree with me: as a writer she has little talent. I would love to live in a world where she was a social media phenomenon and a genuinely good writer. Is that too much to ask?

This is true. Do you think a social media presence can be taken up as a poem even if the actually literature riding alongside isn't good poetry? Are people making their own poems out of the combination of her presence, her words, and their experiences? Or do you see the only manipulation in the "success" of her marketing? I think the archetypes she is whistling up don't stay in the cup, they spill. Her popularity vs. other instagram poets is manipulated and maybe undeserved, I guess. But once the work is in the air, is that all you see in it?

Is it gibberish? Do you suppose that to all who do speak Arabic, and recognize the scripture, the former is the more beautiful? I wouldn't.

Andrew, the only mountains I've observed growing during my lifetime have been volcanic ones, and I certainly wouldn't want them under my feet while they're growing. Maybe your experiences are different.

What Julie has done is a "tabula rasa" effect; she has projected a very specific event from her childhood onto a poem that is very vague. In a similar manner, phony psychics can "zero in" on what seem to be specific facts about a person (possibly deceased) by starting the questioning vaguely and then using hints from the listener as a way of unearthing information. "I'm getting letters--a J and an M." "Her name was Nancy." "Ah, it wasn't an M; it was an N. So she was your . . . ." "Mother."

Sometimes I feel emotionally blackmailed when criticizing a bad piece of writing, and the writer says, "Well, you haven't been through X." The point of good writing is to make the reader experience what X is like.

Well, I don't read Arabic, so I rely on my sources, AKA second-hand news. Now they say it's gibberish: pure décor. As to the reactions of Arabic speakers, I'm not one, as near as dammit; to myself, both sets were equally lovely. My hunch is that Arabic speakers might prefer the Koran verses. But that's just a hunch.

Cheers,
John

Sam: "The point of good writing is to make the reader experience what X is like."
Nicely put, to my mind. This is maybe a key difference between poetry and Rorschach tests.

John

Update: though rather than make, I might say invite.

Mark, that is far too much to ask! We are in agreement that she is not a good poet. To read her poems as poems, which is what all of us on this thread are doing, seems to me a mistake. Yet I'd still rather read her than Ocean Vuong, whose every word, line, and poem is so cloyingly sentimental and artificial-feeling that all of it comes off as insincere and manipulative--though we are told over and over again and by everyone that he is an artist, a great writer. Which brings me to my point: Kaur presents her poems with no pretension; we are the ones who turn them into something else. I think they are merely a way in which she markets herself to a social media audience and that they have no claims to being great literature. That is what I find likable about Kaur.

Thanks, John, for the anecdote! If I had to be religious and had to pick from one of the three great monotheistic religions, I would pick Islam, whose emphasis on words as words and letters as letters, and the metaphysical implications therein, I find strangely relatable and beautiful. A favorite book of poetry is David Melnick's PCOET, which you can read here and which is gibberish yet not devoid of meaning or beauty.

Walter,

Oh dear, what a world.

Believe it or not, I find her likeable (from what I've seen of her) for the same reason. For the last time, good luck to her. Social media is utilised in many much more unpleasant ways!

Now I must read this Vuong person to find something else to get annoyed about.

Cheers.

Mountains take millions of years to form. Her metaphor is perfectly good. Indeed, the very slowness of mountain growth seems to help her point: this is a long struggle. This then transitions into the second half of the poem, where she imagines a violent, catastrophic action, a final shattering, with a new metaphor to capture that. The long struggle has passed a threshold, and offers an opportunity—the task then is to seize that opportunity.

I don't think it's a great poem by any means, but it's more carefully considered than you're giving it credit for.

Aaron, a ceiling of any kind is human-made or human-observed, as in "Ceiling 5000 ft., visibility unlimited." A "glass ceiling" is a cliche, or ready-made metaphor. Using fists, even as synecdoche, would not be a wise or healthful way of breaking one.

Hi Orwn,

And thank you for that glimpse of PCOET - I like it a good deal. There's at least one Christian Morgenstern poem playing with that idea, but not a book.
Rorschach tests: Sam's post crystallized in my thinking a nagging feeling I'd had reading this thread, which is that there is indeed an artifact where radical subjectivity is the unique criterion - the Rorschach test. All we ask of it is the reader's response. I want tools to make different requests of verse, as I think I'll tell my classes next semester. Otherwise we could just publish ink blot collections.

Cheers,
John

I take from this that we are in complete agreement on the following points:

(1) That her poem is more carefully considered than you initially gave it credit for, in particular that
(2) Her mountain metaphor makes sense both in its own right and
(3) As a contrast (gradual vs. cataclysmic) to the smashing of the glass ceiling, but that
(4) The metaphor she chose for the second portion of the contrast is cliché and does not do justice to what the initial lines set up.

John

I quite like your Rorschach test idea here.

That said, in a longer poem, I could have been quite happy to have written

you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too

probably to end it, but certainly with a capital I.

Walter's point cut to the core of my initial question and has helped me to think about Kaur in the way I was hoping to. First, I think separating out the three threads that Kaur works in and helping me to conceptualize her true strength. If there's something to learn from her, it's perhaps from the social media aspect, though that is obviously much easier said than done.

Second, in further cementing that respect I had for her working unpretentiously outside academia. It came up in his first post, but Voung is the perfect counterpoint. I tried to read a poetry review Voung wrote recently, and it was indecipherable, essentially a string of contemporary jargon and tautologies.

Hi Andrew,

I like Rupi Kaur's voice poem as well, and am glad people are reading something they value that's not noxious, in much the way I'm glad of Harry Potter. Folks should read shizzit.
I read that one Ocean Vuong poem I liked, then realized he'd cribbed - or perhaps lifted - his title from Frank O'Hara. It was my favorite part.

Cheers,
John

I awaken on Monday from my weekend Rupi Kaur tirade as if from a dream. Apologies to anyone I annoyed with my churlishness. She is, in the grand scheme of things, clearly a force for good. And that's good.

Mark.

I don't think you have anything to apologize for, Mark. If we can't speak honestly here, on a poetry workshop site, about what we like or dislike in someone's poetry, then where can we?

For the past few days I've been wondering what the late M.A. Griffiths (Eratosphere's "grasshopper," a.k.a. Margaret or Maz) might have added to this discussion about Rupi Kaur's work.

Disclaimer: Of course we really can't know what any deceased person would have thought about current events, and it would be very presumptuous of me even to conjecture, so I won't. But I can think of lots of Maz's comments about other poems, and about art in general, that might be applicable to Kaur's work--in interestingly contradictory ways.

Maz certainly did not suffer crap lightly. She had very little tolerance for being told that she must suspend her usual standards when attempting to evaluate certain pieces of poetry or other art, for any reason. Sometimes it would be because those pieces claimed to be intentionally edgy or experimental or transgressive. She grumbled that certain participants in online poetry workshops were perennially idolized and gushed over because of their personalities or reputations, regardless of the merits of the particular poem being critiqued. And she complained sometimes (in retrospect, and in general terms) that when the subject was the poet's own cancer or rape or loss or other harrowing experience, everyone seemed obliged to call the poem brave and honest and moving work, regardless of its flaws.

Yet Maz often did experimental things, and employed "shock value" topics in her own work, in ways that others disliked.

One of the weakest poems in her collected works is a long prose poem called "Tradition," which involves female genital mutilation. When Maz workshopped it (in a more free-verse-centric online forum, not Eratosphere), someone responded: "Great story. I would like to see the poem. I can imagine the power it might have in your hands."

Maz's response:

I think "the voice of the child is the poem" in some of Kaur's works, too.

Is such a thing really enough to transform a piece of writing into a poem? Most would say (and have said) that it's not enough for them. It's certainly not enough for me in "Tradition," which I don't like on any level.

But I remembered the comment, and thought that Maz might have been inclined to appreciate that aspect of Kaur.

On the other hand, I've also been thinking of Maz's unenthusiastic comments on conceptual art. Some of her thoughts below strike me as very similar to comments others were making in this thread--particularly when she discusses the importance of context to modern pieces that are not intended to (and generally cannot) stand on their own as art. She objects that the audience has to do most of the work to get anything valuable from such pieces, which is not far from what Sam was saying about the tabula rasa effect. And there's another connection to Kaur in that the Tracey Emin art installation to which Maz refers below featured menstrual blood, as does that infamous Rupi Kaur photo (here).

Here are my notes on the artworks cited above, if anyone's interested:

In 1976, the Tate Gallery’s purchase of US artist Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (consisting of 140 bricks) sparked one of the great modern art controversies.

My Bed, exhibited at the Tate in 1999 when shortlisted for the Turner Prize, consisted of British artist Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, used condoms, menstrual blood, and assorted other objects in disarray.

Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1994), was one of Martin Creed’s most famous works before his Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227, the lights going on and off (2001). The latter consisted of an empty room with its electric lights switching on and off in five-second intervals.

Here's another comment from Maz on the same theme:

The latter passage might refer to either of two well-publicised incidents in British art museums.

The first was in October 2001, when a cleaner at the Eyestorm Gallery in Mayfair tidied Damien Hirst’s recreation of an ashtray- and detritus-filled studio table. (The timing suggests that this incident directly influenced Maz's "A Pair of Tate Limericks.")

The second was in August 2004, when a cleaner at the Tate Gallery in London – unaware that the entire area comprised a Gustav Metzger installation – disposed of a bag of rubbish on the floor beside an office desk.

* * *

Many other comments by Maz come to mind, but this post is long enough already. I hope someday to get copyright permissions to publish what I've gathered of Maz's prose. (And the two limericks she wrote about the Tate Museum, too, which are still unpublished.)

Julie,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I feel I would very much like to have been around when Maz was active on the sphere. I have a much longer response bubbling away in my head, but for now I'll just recount an anecdote she might have appreciated from when I visited the Tate Modern, I think for the first time. I recall a room containing nothing but a chair and some video screens. The staff had been obliged, because of weary foot-sore tourists no doubt, to place a sign next to the chair saying 'This is part of an installation: please do not sit on it'. Out in the corridor by a drinks machine was an ordinary plastic chair, upon which some wag had hung a handwritten sign reading 'This is just a chair: please do not appreciate it'.

:)

Wonderful thread! Thoughtful posts and civil exchanges (so welcome, so necessary in these times), and I also want to say that it is a delight to see Julie posting again.

Thanks for the warm wishes. Here's another quote from Maz that I found relevant:

Amen!

Yes, she was very wise and witty. Here's a link to one of my favorite remarks of hers here, although it needs, um, context. :) We had been publicly speculating--in a fashion no longer allowed here--whether a particular Spherean had suffered the eternal damnation of being banned, or had merely been sent into the Limbo of a temporary suspension. Maz wrote:

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showp...1&postcount=41

SNORT!

I agree, a lively, fascinating thread. I especially liked discovering Maz and thinking some about art, the Tate and its choices. I like the chair story.

Cheers,
John