Kim Jong Un is critical of the terrapin farm.

He said: "It is hard to understand that the farm visited by Kim Jong Il did not arrange even the room for education in revolutionary history. The employees who failed to bear deep in their minds his leadership exploits could hardly perform their role as masters in production."

The CNN headline is "No fresh lobster? Kim Jong Un takes aim at North Korean terrapin farm." But the text says: "The farm was also meant to breed freshwater lobsters." Freshwater lobsters are crayfish. If I order "fresh lobster" at The CNN Restaurant and I get a plate of crawdads, I'll be powerfully displeased.

And as long as I'm pointing a finger of denouncement at CNN, I have to wonder about the translation that led to "terrapin." A terrapin is only a type of turtle... you know, the type of turtle that dances and plays the tambourine in front of a log cabin:



Turtles and crayfish are not even in the same phylum.

"I would like to talk about �Sleeping Beauty� and �Swan Lake,� about my battements and my handsome partners..."

"But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin�s terror," wrote the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89.

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin�s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan....

Ms. Plisetskaya was... restricted by the Bolshoi�s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning....

�I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,� she said. �In my time, it was impossible.�

I'd like to hear more specifically how ballet movements could be thought to contain political ideology. I once met a woman in Madison who had learned a difficult craft that produced a type of ordinary object � a lovely version of something quite utilitarian. She expressed anguish in not yet having found a way to make these objects political. I said I thought that loading politics into art tended to make bad art. I dreamed of interesting conversations in Madison. Many years later, I started this blog.

ADDED: I don't like tag proliferation, so I'm using my "merging politics and showbiz" for this. It seems wrong to call ballet "showbiz," but think about it. Why is it wrong? It isn't!

Ah, but I remember I also have an "art and politics" tag. I remember that tag as I think of the conversation with the Madison artisan. Why did those crafted objects prompt me to think "art" when ballet did not? Because I thought of art school.

"We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue."

A Facebook page devoted to ridding the Celoron, New York of the "frightening" statue of Lucille Ball.



We've talked about tearing down (or relocating) statues before, most recently in the context of communist propaganda, which might be good as sculpture per se but carries a message that the people of a particular place never wanted installed. Remember, you voted on it:
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"While the propaganda monuments that remained in prime locations continued to stir regular controversy, this controversy was never massive enough to actually lead to their demolition."

"That's how the supporters of the 'bridges symbols' even managed to list them as heritage, making the demolition harder. Opponents, unable to remove the sculptures, then attempted to 'put them into context' through 'additional features.' Some of them were temporary (e.g. a NATO flag overshadowing the Soviet army sculpture), others permanent (e.g. a plaque with information on the Soviet occupation), yet others never completed (e.g. a suggestion to put the statues in cages)."

From an article about the relocation of the �aliasis Bridge statues to Grutas Park � a place of exile for Soviet-era sculpture in Lithuania �which we were talking about last week, after the NYT did a story about living in Airbnb places in Europe that included photos of Americans enjoying themselves in the company of gigantic statues of Lenin and Stalin. That second link has a video about Grutas Park that shows the �aliasis Bridge statues and discusses the now-overruled decision to leave them in their prominent place on the 4 corners of the bridge.

I could understand the decision to leave them there, but I'm a stranger to the context. Sculpture that was designed for a particular site is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved. If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do? The middle position is to move the sculpture out of its place of honor but otherwise to preserve it. Keep in mind the subject of Islamist extremists who have been sledgehammering ancient statues, which is what got me started talking about this subject.

What would you do with artistically good statues that you deeply disapprove of?

Completely destroy them.

Put them in a museum setting with labeling that explains the reason for disapproval.

Leave them on the site where they were designed to appear.

Make case by case decisions based on the site, the statue, and the reason for disapproval.

 

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ADDED: There's also the question whether the site was designed for the sculpture. Are the 4 corners of �aliasis Bridge plinths or did the sculpture-supporting function arise in the mind of the invader?