Fire & Meerkats
Back home, we have a brilliant turn of phrase: 'You can't polish a turd'. From time to time I take delight in sharing this eloquent expression with American colleagues and students to emphasize a point, namely, that something that is inherently bad cannot be made good or masked effectively by something superficial, no matter how hard one tries. Nevertheless, the inverse of the idiom is equally true, and a warning for post-modern tendencies: You can smear s**t on a diamond. Today's Bing headline (don't ask me why as still use 'Bing'... at least I'm not asking "Jeeves") displayed an example of such. Le Mans Cathedral, an iconic display of Gothic architecture, was inhabited in 2015 (yes, those many moons ago... again, 'Bing') by a series of multi-colored meerkats . In this single display of apparently comedic and boundary-testing art, this instance that has re-emerged portrays what Western Europe has systematically accomplished in the des...
