What would Edward Said have said?
Alas for the late Edward W. Said. His critics have been harsh with him over the years, and that is to be expected. But just look at what his friends and admirers have done to him:
Designing this thing took over two years, apparently; one feels a certain admiration for those responsible, for it surely takes skills of a rare order to work so long upon a project that means so much to you and end up with something that fails so comprehensively on so many levels. Admittedly, murals are rarely great art, but they can at least occasionally attain directness, clarity, vigour and - not least - visual appeal. This object manages to possess none of these qualities, and to miss out on many more. It is everything one might expect when hearing the term ‘Palestinian Cultural Mural’, and less.
A group called the General Union of Palestine Students is responsible for the thing, which is going to be inaugurated on 2 November 2007 at San Francisco State University. A page on the university web site, headed ‘Palestinain [sic] Mural Honoring Professor Edward Said’, includes a truly vast un-resized image of the mural (2800 x 2116 pixels squashed into 543 x 327 pixels, forsooth) and goes on to threaten a day-long celebration including ‘Native American Dance’ and ‘Arab-American hip hop’ to accompany the inauguration.
Edward Said, who, whatever view one takes of his politics and his scholarship, was a great aesthete with a fine critical judgement in artistic matters, must be spinning like a wind turbine in his grave.
[Found via Solomonia, to whom due acknowledgement and thanks.]
