HUMOUR, eh?
Yes, that wiped the smile off your face.
Certainly, in China, humour is no laughing matter. Shanghai-based artist Dai Jianyong has been detained for depicting President Xi Jinping with a moustache and a screwed-up face.
I cannot see the harm in depicting someone with a screwed-up face. But, admittedly, adding a moustache to someone's phizog is seriously mischievous. I feel the president's pain. As you can see from my picture, someone keeps drawing a beard on me.
However, in the great scheme of things, adding a moustache to the president's face surely cannot rank as a crime. Yet Mr Dai stands accused of "creating a disturbance" and faces up to five years in prison if convicted.
The only disturbance it has created is in the head of President Xi who, with his over-sensitive reaction, has made himself look more of a fool than any artist might. Mind you, the Xister takes a rather narrow view of art.
The Independent has noted his previously expressed view that art should "embody socialist values in a lively and vivid way". Now, I'm as socialist as the next man, but I get a bit antsy when it's lively. I'm more comfortable when it's moaning.
Xi exulted further: "Fine artworks should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles." In other words, it should resemble the illustrations from Ladybird Books (of which I admit I too am particularly fond).
I cannot think that Dai's moustache and screwed up face make much of a political point. However, his case wasn't helped when the usual unthinking oafs on social media said his depiction made Comrade Xi look like Hitler, the controversial German dictator.
He has also christened the work "chrysanthemum face", an innocent sounding expression disguising the fact that the flower is a Chinese slang term for bum, as in the body part of the buttockular region.
All the same, you cannot lock a man up for that. Say what you like about alleged prime minister David Cameron, but I can call him a pie-faced pillock without having my liberty compromised beyond a harmless telephone tap (good luck listening to all these cold calls, lads).
Someone should tell the Chinese authorities to shut up and just get on with the dictating, instead of meddling in art. Artists everywhere should be free to paint what they want, with enhanced state stipends for those who depict the world in the style of the old Ladybird books.
Blue skies and sunshine tick my boxes. As for undesirable work styles: don't make me laugh.
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