Anthropomorphism and Demagoguery: Rhinos in the town and elephants in the room

On symbolizing demagoguery…

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Tom: Remember Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, two guys sitting at a café table, and a rhinoceros runs down the street?

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Dick: Yeah. And then another comes charging along and stomps a dog and people are outraged.

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Tom: But then everyone in the town turns into rhinoceroses.

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Dick: A satire on people following Fascism.

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Tom: I wonder if we could rework the metaphor. Maybe use an elephant.

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Dick: Ah. The elephant in the room?

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Voice-over

Tom Fogler wrote a play called The Elephant in the Room. Borrowing from the past and reworking a metaphor to tell a new story. Fortunately, animals are not litigiously inclined to charge in trumpeting, “Calling me a demagogue? I’ll sue you!”

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Pictures at an Exhibition

Two critics discuss the works at the Out of Doubt exhibition…

Cavillor: Why is it called “Furniture Art”? Because there actually isn’t any furniture in it. There are hands, and I can see a rhinoceros or two. It reminds me of a play by Eugene Ionesco, Rhinocéros, in which two people in a café are having a conversation while a rhinoceros runs back and forth along the street in front of them. But at least the artist could draw.

Katherina: The buckets of cement with wires coming out I liked. Perhaps the artist meant to invoke a sense of space. But I also felt the arrangement produced a sense of clutter, much as we navigate our way through the clutter of an urban environment. With these kinds of installations, you're never sure if the artist has any graphic skills or not.

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Voice-over

Inverse Proportion between Graphic Art Skills
and Level of Absurdity and Reductionism in Modern Art

The reference to Ionesco makes a link between some examples of modern art and the theater of the absurd.  Sometimes might there even be a correlation between the lack of graphic skills such as drawing or painting the greater degree of absurdity? Or perhaps reductionism. But maybe this hypothesis could also be challenged as a reductio ad absurdum.

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