Home » Opinion » Book review
Mesmerized by trivia, tinsel and trash
By Wan Lixin |
July 17, 2010, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
GILBERT Adair's 1997 book "Surfing the Zeitgeist" is a collection of 80 essays about the state of culture, with a British bent.
Reviewing it against the Chinese background 13 years later enables me to be more certain about some of the trends that were emerging when the book was written.
Given the chaos and superficialities that characterize the myriad phenomena aggrandized as "cultural," surfing them does not lend the aspect of orderly treatment.
Adair points to the importance of celebrities in our life.
"A more disturbing development is that the mania for names has started to infiltrate other, traditionally more elevated forms of printed information. Books, for example," he points out.
Today nothing sells more than a popular name.
Although many -- officials or even scholars -- may have been advanced on the strengths of faked credentials, none makes so much noise as Tang Jun, who is (still) among the best paid executives in China.
He makes hundreds of millions yuan acting as a manager.
Investigating claims in Tang Jun's bestselling biography reveals that the university that granted Tang Jun his PhD, Pacific Western University, is a diploma mill in the United States.
In response to other allegations, Tang now says the coauthor of his biography may have cannibalized factually incorrect online reports.
Tang's success story certainly makes profits, but his scandals can be doubly exciting, because he is such a celebrity.
Our faith in the likes of Tang Jun reflects the control of the media on our consciousness.
We no longer have the energy, nor inclination, to get to know our neighbors, when we know so much about the intimacies of stars, or starlets, luminaries, or lunatics.
The dominance of "actemes," which are essentially images or icons, as the reigning art form desensitizes us to anything not mediated by images.
The rise of technological duplication and computer-aided creation leads to a steady lowering of tastes.
Many Shakespearian dramas once played to the gallery. Today they can only play to academics.
As a matter of fact, theaters no longer interest people. A scene or an emotion that has to be mediated by words is so ineffective.
"The century's most potent and popular story-telling medium is not the novel at all but the cinema, the dream factory, the acteme factory ..." the book reads.
Today cinemas are being constantly enhanced by special effects, sporting 3D, panoramic, or cycloramic features.
Some cinemas have mechanized chairs that can jerk and shake you to a higher pitch of excitement.
A blockbuster's success can usually be guaranteed by a celebrity director plus an astronomical budget figure.
There has never been so sweet a honeymoon between the so-called art and the money.
Celebrity director (businessman) Feng Xiaogang's latest blockbuster "The Tangshan Earthquake" includes so many placement of branded telephone, insurance companies, banks, and plush cars, that the audience is being exploited, even while shedding tears.
A new TV drama series based on Chinese classical novel "A Dream of Red Mansions" advanced a tantalizing tip that the heroin Daiyu would die in the nude.
In the 1940s veteran scholar Wu Mi stormed a restaurant because it used the name of Daiyu's garden Xiaoxiang Guan as its name, as this was considered an affront to the chastity and modesty of Daiyu.
As Adair says, it is not just about living luminaries.
In China in recent years there has been a fever to dramatize, fictionalize, polemicize, or trivialize the life of old emperors, ministers, with a particular emphasis on their romances.
As Friedrich Schiller wrote in his "Letters upon the Esthetic Education of Man," "Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient."
Nothing is too sacred to be subjugated to mammon.
Realism cannot be in fashion.
As Oscar Wilde said, "The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass."
In the twenty-first century artists take refuge in the arcane.
"What is possibly most disturbing is that postmodern critics seem to have rendered the concept of originality so obsolete, so irrelevant and so confusing as to defy all attempts at elucidation," Adair writes.
Modern humans can't stand silence, as noises are being created nonstop.
The noise helps supply the distraction needed to prevent mechanized existence from degenerating into a life of "quiet desperation."
Reviewing it against the Chinese background 13 years later enables me to be more certain about some of the trends that were emerging when the book was written.
Given the chaos and superficialities that characterize the myriad phenomena aggrandized as "cultural," surfing them does not lend the aspect of orderly treatment.
Adair points to the importance of celebrities in our life.
"A more disturbing development is that the mania for names has started to infiltrate other, traditionally more elevated forms of printed information. Books, for example," he points out.
Today nothing sells more than a popular name.
Although many -- officials or even scholars -- may have been advanced on the strengths of faked credentials, none makes so much noise as Tang Jun, who is (still) among the best paid executives in China.
He makes hundreds of millions yuan acting as a manager.
Investigating claims in Tang Jun's bestselling biography reveals that the university that granted Tang Jun his PhD, Pacific Western University, is a diploma mill in the United States.
In response to other allegations, Tang now says the coauthor of his biography may have cannibalized factually incorrect online reports.
Tang's success story certainly makes profits, but his scandals can be doubly exciting, because he is such a celebrity.
Our faith in the likes of Tang Jun reflects the control of the media on our consciousness.
We no longer have the energy, nor inclination, to get to know our neighbors, when we know so much about the intimacies of stars, or starlets, luminaries, or lunatics.
The dominance of "actemes," which are essentially images or icons, as the reigning art form desensitizes us to anything not mediated by images.
The rise of technological duplication and computer-aided creation leads to a steady lowering of tastes.
Many Shakespearian dramas once played to the gallery. Today they can only play to academics.
As a matter of fact, theaters no longer interest people. A scene or an emotion that has to be mediated by words is so ineffective.
"The century's most potent and popular story-telling medium is not the novel at all but the cinema, the dream factory, the acteme factory ..." the book reads.
Today cinemas are being constantly enhanced by special effects, sporting 3D, panoramic, or cycloramic features.
Some cinemas have mechanized chairs that can jerk and shake you to a higher pitch of excitement.
A blockbuster's success can usually be guaranteed by a celebrity director plus an astronomical budget figure.
There has never been so sweet a honeymoon between the so-called art and the money.
Celebrity director (businessman) Feng Xiaogang's latest blockbuster "The Tangshan Earthquake" includes so many placement of branded telephone, insurance companies, banks, and plush cars, that the audience is being exploited, even while shedding tears.
A new TV drama series based on Chinese classical novel "A Dream of Red Mansions" advanced a tantalizing tip that the heroin Daiyu would die in the nude.
In the 1940s veteran scholar Wu Mi stormed a restaurant because it used the name of Daiyu's garden Xiaoxiang Guan as its name, as this was considered an affront to the chastity and modesty of Daiyu.
As Adair says, it is not just about living luminaries.
In China in recent years there has been a fever to dramatize, fictionalize, polemicize, or trivialize the life of old emperors, ministers, with a particular emphasis on their romances.
As Friedrich Schiller wrote in his "Letters upon the Esthetic Education of Man," "Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient."
Nothing is too sacred to be subjugated to mammon.
Realism cannot be in fashion.
As Oscar Wilde said, "The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass."
In the twenty-first century artists take refuge in the arcane.
"What is possibly most disturbing is that postmodern critics seem to have rendered the concept of originality so obsolete, so irrelevant and so confusing as to defy all attempts at elucidation," Adair writes.
Modern humans can't stand silence, as noises are being created nonstop.
The noise helps supply the distraction needed to prevent mechanized existence from degenerating into a life of "quiet desperation."
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