Thursday, April 28, 2005
Pah. So much for all that hypocritical crap about making Singapore a cultured place, yada blah blah. How do you cultivate a Singaporean culture when you're making it so difficult for it to grow? Build some horrendously ugly building, give it a poseur french name, and install it with a library that after so long still has books so new their spines haven't even been cracked yet. And while they're at it, make the lighting so dim and the capacity so small that it just looks all artsy but isn't much use. Whatever. I'm afraid it still isn't equivalent to "culture".
And of course they encourage the paintings, dance, photographs, music, musicals and some theatre. Afterall how political can these mediums get? Or rather, how political can Singaporean artists who use these mediums get? Some issues need language to reach the masses - politics is one of them.
This ranks right up there with the "discussions" about building that wonderful euphemism for casinos, now called "integrated resorts" by all major news channels/newspapers. (The same people who call the "inadvertent" casualties and destruction inflicted on civilians in the course of military operations 'collateral damage'. How nice.)
Squash the poets/writers on one hand, and on the other hand, let appalling things like "Phua Chu Kang: The Musical" cast its beastly pall over the land. Hey I like Gurmit Singh, he's a great guy. But there are better things than a pathetic caricature of an Ah-Beng in yellow boots when it comes to showing an international audience a symbol of our nation. Or perhaps Singaporean culture is about commercialised crassness afterall, and if so I'm joining Dreamcatcher in the search for our definition of a dream house - an ivory tower.
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