Recent links of note:
“The War on Dogs”
Stephanie Howard-Smith, History Today
It was recently revealed that the British government seriously considered the culling of “all the cats in Britain” to prevent the transmission of COVID from feline to human. Though it is clear now that cats could not spread the disease to humans, writes Stephanie Howard-Smith for History Today, there have been several instances in the past when city officials urged the public to take matters into their own hands to reduce cat and dog populations during bouts of widespread sickness or plague. Indeed, in 1665, when the Great Plague ravaged London, the Common Council ordered that “all dogs and cats should be immediately killed.” In his fictional account Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe claimed that as many as forty thousand dogs and two hundred thousand cats died as a result of public paranoia caused by the order. In London in 1760, when canines were culled to prevent the spread of mad dog disease (rabies), the English writer Horace Walpole decried the streets as “the very picture of the murder of the innocents.” Thankfully London did not replicate that madness in 2020.
“I have gorgeous hair”
Emily Wilson, London Review of Books
“Some things are up to us and some are not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in his Handbook. A central theme of Epictetus’s teachings, writes Emily Wilson in her review of The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses and Fragments by Epictetus, translated by Robin Waterfield, is choosing to ignore that which we can’t control. When we do that, we relinquish our “false beliefs” and align our “will” (prohairesis in Greek) with our “well-being” (eudaimonia). Epictetus, who was born into slavery, taught that “wealth, health, and status” possess a tyranny over individual will that enslaves the mind. Peace of mind, rather than righteous rage or indignation at societal injustice, is the goal of Epictetus’s philosophy. Dignity, however, must be maintained: blatant contempt for societal norms shown through what Wilson identifies as the “stoicism” of Diogenes the Cynic finds no place in Epictetus’s philosophy. Though total factual accuracy is impossible to achieve when translating ancient works, Waterfield’s translation, writes Wilson, is clear and readable in a way that “brings out Epictetus’s humor and conversational tone as well as his philosophical vision.”
“With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum”
Jason Farago, The New York Times
Nowadays it is exceedingly rare for The New York Times to cry foul over exhibitions that claim to expose artists as problematic, and even rarer still for our pages to articulate anything other than contempt for this newspaper. Yet the critic Jason Farago, for the Art Review of The New York Times, recently disparaged the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition on Pablo Picasso, entitled “It’s Pablo-Matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” To Farago, the exhibition is yet another installment in the “social-justice-themed, pop-culture” cancel industry. The main argument Hannah Gadsby (an Australian comedian with a degree in art history) makes, writes Farago, is that, though Picasso was a good artist, he was “a jerk around women,” and “women, too, have stories to tell.” That’s about it. The ambition of the exhibition, which features eight second-rate Picassos as well as other works by female artists, is at “GIF level”; its wall labels, with commentary from Gadsby, appear more like “Instagram captions.” Even the art by female artists, which appears to have little to do with Picasso, is reduced to serving as “mere raconteurs of women’s lives,” emphasizing the female artists’ stories, as well as the social and moral comfort of the viewer, over the art itself and the “productive tension” that might come from it.