After a reportedly brief vogue in the '50s, with gorillas, um, aping the slatherings of Jackson Pollock, our ruder evolutionary cousins have now discovered representation. As the Times reported last week, primates appear to have figured out how to depict the world around them, instead of simply fingerpainting to kill time between bananas. It probably couldn't be helped, this downspecies focus on noble sub-savages who, while possessed of a delicate chromatic sensibility and a love for the brush, haven't gotten around to worrying about clothes yet, much less money. Will Self's novel Great Apes is just the latest example of species-inversion as acerbic cautionary tale. Dolphins and whales don't seem to spend a whole lot of time plotting ways to murder each other.
Dogs are loyal.
Pandas are cute. Intriguing, but we might want to maintain some faith in human American artists, at least until King Kong gets around to painting us. Sure, democracy and human rights are desirable long-term objectives, he argued. But the Chinese people, engaged in sweeping modernization, aren't yet ready for such frills.