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Beyond beige, John Newton

A Rainbow Reader
Tessa Laird
Clouds, $25.00, ISBN 9780987659378

Plato, I learned recently from the wonderful Maggie Nelson (Bluets, 2009), wanted to banish not just the poets from his republic but also the painters. They were “mixers and grinders of multi-coloured drugs”; colour itself was a menace, a kind of narcotic. But then as David Batchelor argues in Chromophobia (2000), nothing much has changed in western culture in the intervening centuries. The closer you come to the domain of elite taste (the styliest bar, the most exclusive boutique) the more you are reminded that colour is not cool. Bright tones are for pimps and foreigners, for children, for primitives, for hippies and mad people. Who paints their living room other than off-white? Who goes to art school dressed in anything but black?

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Posted in Art, History, Non-fiction, Review
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