Or wait, let's call for a permanent deletion of this phrase from the English language:
"the esoteric wisdom of the East"
Christ on a crutch, people, can we let go of the Orientalist tropes of previous centuries already? I ran across this phrase in a tome on Chinese snuff bottles published in 1993, a full 15 years after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. Any art historian worth her salt should've known better than to engage in such stereotypical and antiquated rhetoric by the 1990s. Alas, the snuff bottle obsessives who wrote this tome - and good lord, is it a high-falutin' tome - had been publishing since the 1960s and had probably been so obsessed with the ins and outs of snuff bottles, spoons, and stoppers that they hadn't bothered to keep up with, you know, *art history" per se.
I am also in a bit of a snit about Hester Bateman, but I'll save that for another day.
Holiday cheer.
18 hours ago
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3 comments:
How's the weather? Are you safe and sound? Where was the storm?
How's the weather? Are you safe and sound? Where was the storm?
Somehow I approved yr comment twice - hmmm? I am safe, thank you for asking! The tornados were in north Mississippi, 90+ miles from me. We got ugly storms but luckily no tornados in my neck of the woods.
Love your wisteria & azalea photos, by the way - ours bloomed about two weeks ago. The storm pretty much wiped out what was left of the azalea blooms, though.
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