Write on the walls: Writings On The Wall | Shack Breakfast & Lunch

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The saying ‘The writing is on the wall’

The writing is on the wall

Other phrases about:

• Houses and buildings
• The Bible

What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘The writing is on the wall’?

The expression ‘the writing is on the wall’ is used whenever an inevitable result or imminent danger has become apparent.

What’s the origin of the phrase ‘The writing is on the wall’?

‘The writing is on the wall’ is also sometimes expressed as ‘the handwriting is on the wall’ or as ‘mene mene’. The first of those variations is an obvious synonym but what does ‘mene mene’ mean? This is a shortening of ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’, which is of Aramaic origin. If your Aramaic isn’t that strong you can get some guidance from the Bible, Daniel 5, in the story of Belshazzar’s feast. To cut a long Old Testament story short, Belshazzar was indulging in a drunken revelry and debasing sacred temple vessels by using them as wine goblets when a disembodied hand wrote ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’ on the palace wall.

On the face of it, and using a literal translation, this appeared meaningless. The expression seemed to mean ‘two minas, a shekel and two parts’ or alternatively ‘numbered, weighed, divided’. None of this meant much to Belshazzar, who decided that he needed further interpretation and sent for the Jewish exile Daniel. It then became clear that the phrase was an elaborate wordplay, relying on the fact that each word can denote a different coin, and the third word can be interpreted as ‘Persia’. Daniel’s interpretation, as recorded in the first easily understood English version of the Bible, the King James Version, 1611, was:

And this the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
This the interpretation of the thing:
MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

The point of the moral tale was that Belshazzar couldn’t see the warning that was apparent to others because he was engrossed with his sinning ways.

The subtlety of the biblical wordplay is now somewhat lost on those of us who don’t speak ancient Aramaic. Perhaps a flavour of the style can be conveyed by comparing it to the lyrics of the popular World War II novelty song Mairzy Doats:

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy diveya
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?

Literally, that’s meaningless but a wartime Daniel could have translated it into its actual meaning:

Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,
A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?

‘Writing on the wall’ began to be used figuratively, that is providing warnings where no actual writing or walls are involved, from the early 18th century; for example, Jonathan Swift’s
Miscellaneous works, 1720:

A baited Banker thus desponds,
From his own Hand foresees his Fall;
They have his Soul who have his Bonds;
‘Tis like the Writing on the Wall.

It is forbidden to write on the walls. Draw – you can

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Newspaper material

Graffiti art has long been ignored by collectors as frightening and incomprehensible, but this technique is gradually gaining recognition – and market valuation

Julia Halperin

09/24/2015

Saul LeWitt. Exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Librado Romero/The New York Times

Designed by the Conceptualists by Sol Levitt and by Lawrence Weiner in the 1960s, this method is also used by the younger generation, including artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Hugo Rondinone and Jeff Elrod .

Wall paintings can be called the oldest form of art: the images in the cave of Lascaux in France were created 17.3 thousand years ago. The technique is “every time being revived according to the needs of the current cultural moment,” says Claire Gilman , senior curator at the New York Drawing Center, which now exhibits graffiti by the French artist Abdelkader Benshamma ( Dark Matter Image , before March 1, 2016).

Slow response

But collectors are slowly catching on to this trend. Levitt’s top 10 auction lists don’t include any wall paintings, although they do show up “about once a year,” according to Joanna Flom , head of daytime contemporary art at Sotheby’s. Conceptual graffiti by Levitt and Weiner cost only a fraction of the price of large-scale paintings by minimalist colleagues such as Ed Reinhardt and Brice Marden .

But the situation is changing. Last spring, hedge fund manager Adam Sender sold LeWitt’s Wall Painting #42 (1970) at Sotheby’s for $437,000, a record price for this artist’s work in this technique. At Art Basel in June, Marian Goodman devoted an entire wall of its booth to Lawrence Weiner’s , which sold for $225,000, $40,000 more than Weiner’s auction record of $185,000, set at Christie’s a month earlier.

Noticing an increase in inquiries from collectors, New York insurer Crystal & Company recently began offering concept art insurance.

The popularity and market success of artists such as Banksy (whose work can be purchased with a certificate from his studio) and Kara Walker (whose paper installations sell for $500,000) have accustomed collectors to works that are created directly on wall. “It’s more of a curiosity, but we’re seeing more people getting involved,” says Joanna Flam.

For example, installation costs vary; Michael Craig-Martin’s text work can cost less than $100 (collectors simply order the font online), while LeWitt’s large piece fetches over $10,000 if the collector wants a copyright-approved professional to come to create the work. The good news is that a wall art certificate is much cheaper to insure than a painting, and the cost of storage and transportation is zero.

Sex with a unicorn

“Graffiti is not very easy to acquire: sometimes certificates are needed; if you move, you need to have the job redone,” says dealer Barbara Gladstone . This summer, her gallery presented a miniature retrospective of wall paintings: 16 artists were given one wall each in her two New York locations.

The purpose of the exhibition was to demonstrate the diversity of this technique. The artist Arturo Herrera used the fresco technique of the Renaissance to paint an abstract composition on the wall. Raymond Pettibon created a mural depicting Sid Vicious , bassist of Sex Pistols , having sex with a unicorn.

For Levitt, a pioneer of conceptual form, painting on a wall was a way, in Gilman’s words, “to move away from the limited canvas to a sense that art can bring out the real world.” This presence effect appeals to artists, dealers and collectors alike. “I have Levitt on all four walls in my bedroom and it’s amazing,” admits Gladstone. 912 February 2014 12:10

The infamous Moscow graffiti artist visited us with a lecture on street art.

Photo: Ivan MARKOV

Cities rarely get lucky with graffiti. Most often, these are just illegible graffiti on the walls, the meaning of which will only be thought about by one person out of a hundred. It is easiest for street artists to stay at the same stage of development, so most of them are still using spray paint, and such artists themselves become only designers of their fictitious name. Approximately this conclusion was reached by a Moscow graffiti artist Kirill Kto who came to Kaliningrad with a lecture on street art, which was held on Sunday evening at the Rudy Dutschke Cinema Club.

Kirill himself stood at the origins of Moscow graffiti and knows all its pros and cons. Being one of the founders of the well-known “Why” team, he tried to make the layman think about his environment, offered to return the city to its inhabitants by involving them in a dialogue with this city.

Who left this inscription near the iconic Winzavod in Moscow

However, the rest of the “why” had a different opinion, so it was this team, as one of the oldest and most authoritative, that provoked the general vandalism fashion in its usual sense. There was no longer any talk of some kind of code of honor for a street artist. According to Kirill himself, he personally feels a sense of regret because of his involvement in the spread of the wholesale fashion of the senseless replication of the same inscription or the same logo, so one fine day he began to re-educate the younger generation of graffiti artists from his podium.

Who decided to re-educate the younger generation of graffiti artists, for which he tours the country, arranging meetings. Photo: Ivan MARKOV

– You go out into the street not with a ready-made idea, – says Kirill, – The city itself tells you what you should do he plays with you. The environment is spoiled not only by teenage graffiti artists, but also by outdoor advertising and personal vehicles. These are the hints. Of course, they still have time to spoil us badly, but as long as they exist, you can counteract them.

Kirill Kto, having no art education, in 2012 entered the Top 50 most influential people in Russian art according to Artchronika magazine. To date, he has worked at various cultural venues, including Winzavod, and is also one of the initiators of the Partizaning project.

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