Weekend Words: Throne
"A throne is only a bench covered with velvet."
The wait to participate in Maurizio Cattelan’s new project at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, “America” (2016), an 18-karat toilet, has reached two hours, as reported by Hyperallergic’s Carey Dunne. According to the museum’s website, the artist drew upon Marcel Duchamp’s overturned urinal, “Fountain” (1917), and other sources for inspiration, but one unanticipated cultural reference has since crept into the debate, “in a word, Trump. The aesthetics of this ‘throne’ recall nothing so much as the gilded excess of Trump’s real-estate ventures and private residences. While Cattelan agrees that he could hardly have known about the rise of Trump when he conceived of the piece, he said that, ‘it was probably in the air.’ He added, that the Trump connection is, ‘another layer, but it shouldn’t be the only one.'”
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
—Michele de Montaigne, Essays
Sitting on a throne is a thousand times harder than winning one.
—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Beneath the shadow of Thy Throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine Arm Alone,
And our defense is sure.
—Thomas Wyatt, The Psalms of David Imitated
Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
—Maximilien Robespierre
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
—William Inge
No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
—William Penn
A throne is only a bench covered with velvet.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
When wilt thou save the people?
Oh, God of Mercy! when?
The people, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
—George Ellis (The Corn Law Rhymer), “The People’s Anthem”
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 80
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
—William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
I actually don’t want a throne at all, because I don’t view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.
—Lady Gaga
I will remain on the throne until I fall off.
—Margrethe II of Denmark
