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| Would Hercules Seghers have judged the Rijksmuseum to be sufficiently worthy of note to produce an etching of it, had the building been around at the time? Who knows - but had it been, we wouldn't have had to concern ourselves with the tendency on the part of those who are "in the loop" to, is there an elegant way of putting it, tart up the building. |
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An acquaintance of mine is on good terms with someone who lets him handle
Hercules Seghers etchings at one of the museums. Get my friend started on
this and you can practically hear his heart starting to race with sheer
delight. I can empathise with that. Soon someone else will take my friend's
acquaintance's seat, and he or she will grant someone else a similarly
wonderful favour. This could go either way: either the formerly privileged
party will be furious for having been denied his privilege, or he will
appreciate how lucky he has been and will be happy that someone else is now
being given the opportunity to sample what heaven on earth can be like.
Let's stage a referendum on this. These are the two questions which I'd like you to address: - Do you consider it right that privileges of this kind exist? Could you in fact resign to the notion that it's always someone else who draws the longest straw? Look at it any way you like, informal circuits are by definition small. Do you, in short, consider this idea to be particularly charming as it symbolises the never-ending rejuvenation of a caring institution, so that you accept for the sake of the symbolic - suffice it to know - that only the happy few are able and permitted to enjoy something or other while bowing to the frustration of those who fall between two stools? - Is it your view that everyone should be able to enjoy, to touch, and that a clause should be written into our basic human rights (sadly we will have to leave the fruit flies out of consideration due to their short life span, even though by comparison they have a considerably greater number of genes than us and might well be extremely dab hands in the verbal cultural-cum-philosophical discourse department - have you ever wondered just how keen the little rascals may be when it comes to settling on top of a painted ripe peach?) to the effect that the number of people on the planet divided by the number of works of art multiplied by people's average age should equal the number of times a human being should be given the opportunity to actually handle a work of art? Before you start deleting as appropriate, please allow me to make a confession. I have just discovered that the above is not quite correct. In fact, it turns out that the whole world is welcome (provided they can produce valid ID papers) to engage in a direct confrontation with the artistic heritage of Hercules Seghers. Apparently this applies to absolutely anyone. I admit that this came as a bit of a blow to me. Too bad about the column, I thought. But then again, isn't this an example of the level playing field thing that the Americans are so fond of banging on about? It's unlikely that the whole world will want to avail themselves of this splendid opportunity, but if we assume that this type of recreation was both as well-known and attractive as, say, watching Coronation Street, it would be likely that you'd have to count on spending quite some time queuing up before it was your turn. And so that makes me right after all, albeit for different reasons. In the end I decided that this column also serves the purpose of stressing how easy it is for an erroneous analysis to be prompted by a lack of factual knowledge, and that evading the truth is not quite the same as telling untruths. And anyway, fallacies have a way of working in a debate even if your opponent exposes them, as they're usually a sign of a lack of clarity in the counterargument. I myself am pretty awful at retorting, you see, and so I indulge in written fallacies on which I bestow the correct answer, or the other way around. |