Via: MOMA
The Charge by Félix Vallotton, (1893).
Woodcut, composition: 7 7/8 x 10 1/4”
Via: NY Books dot Com written by Charles Simic
“Nothing ever changes” may be one of the truest things ever said. Certainly, life was different when our grandparents were young, in many ways far worse and in other ways far better—as they never failed to inform us every time some new, faddish invention came along. But despite all the predictions of social reformers and utopian thinkers, human behavior seems to have remained pretty much the same throughout recorded history. The four-thousand-year old admonition in the Code of Hammurabi that the strong be prevented from oppressing the weak, or Thomas Moore’s observation in the sixteenth century that society was a conspiracy of the rich to defraud the poor, are not only perfectly understandable today, but are aimed at the same problem that has brought demonstrators to the streets from Wall Street to Oakland. You’d think that the outsourcing of millions of jobs, the taking of away people’s homes, the stealing of their pensions, and the making of fortunes out of their tragedies would make Americans remember their family’s histories, the fact that so many of us started off as poor or persecuted. But, obviously, that’s not the case. It’s because we remember so little and prefer to be told fairy tales about our nation’s past that nothing ever fundamentally changes with us.
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