Confucius say

I read recently in that wonderful little paper The Week, that there is a drive in China to restore the teachings of Confucius to the heart of their cultural life because President Hu Jintao “seems to believe that China’s rampant consumerism has left an ethical vacuum and that a return to Confucian values of honour and decency could fill it.”

I’m all for honour and decency, and look at the fine mess rampant consumerism has got we Westerners into, but I have to take issue with some of his pearls of wisdom. For instance, don’t you just love this:

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.

Ha! No wonder Mao condemned him, and women hard to deal with? Since when?

And this one puzzles me:

I detest purple replacing vermilion.

Now they don’t say in what context he made this statement so I shall have to do a little research, but I have always found Purple to be a most pleasing colour: seductive and sensuous, luxurious and enchanting, rich and glorious, a colour full of power and opulence, a colour for basking lovers . . . .

Ah . . . That would be it then. According to The Week, he deplored innovation, scorned the idea of progress, and hoped for a society where learning, study and ceremony would be put before pleasure and power. This might explain also the bit about women being difficult. Perhaps his wife got stroppy when he refused to visit her bedchamber after she’d replaced his favourite red silk sheets with vulgar violet ones.

You see, even one of the worlds greatest thinkers could be undone by the vagaries of colour preference.

(I don’t know if Confucius did have a wife, but if he did maybe she was herself of low birth and he had trouble persuading the in-laws to keep their distance.)

One final offering from the great man:

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

Now, I’m very interested in this from an artistic point of view. Whether to paint what one wants and feels driven to express, or to paint what will sell. My husband and I have very different views on this and I have had cause in the past to give him a verbal lashing for suggesting that I “knock out” multiples of some of my more popular work that I could have sold several times over. Visits to my own bedchamber were curtailed till he saw the error of his thinking, and now my husband bows to my superiority on the artistic front, but agrees wholeheartedly with Confucius ... that women are indeed difficult to deal with ....

And artists even more difficult.