Soon after the Yuan-dynasty scroll Five Drunken Princes Returning on Horseback fetched £32 million at auction in Hong Kong, here’s some more Breaking News from this “world-beating” Scepter’d Isle * of our fabled (viz. illusory) New Jerusalem, never never never to be outdone:
Blurry 1986 polaroid Four Pissed Mates On the Razz Staggering Out of a Stretch Limo in Pink Sombreros After a Karaoke Night fetches 99p at a car boot sale
Just like the elegant calligraphy of the colophons with the scroll, the photo is adorned with scrawlings in marker-pen of a Hitler moustache and Sundry Ribald Appendages [popular beat combo—Ed.], further enhancing its market value.
Rule Britannia, eh! And Did those Feet in Ancient Time?—No, they didn’t. Mind you, just wait another 700 years, it’ll be the buyer’s descendants who have the last laugh. I need hardly add that subaltern studies are grist to my mill.
Among the Tang princes depicted in the Chinese scroll is the future Xuanzong emperor—for a spoof from the great Tang historian Denis Twitchett, click here. For some drôle Tang poetic titles, see here; for more art, see On visual culture and Great art missing the crucial element. Note also headlines tag, and Five go mad in Dorset.
* With All Due Respect to Shakespeare and Elizabethan orthography, it’s the apostrophe there that really Gets My Goat.
