In keeping with a dreary fashion for scientific/academic nomenclature within the arts, Bilateria opened last thursday at Five Hundred Dollars on Vyner Street. A group show of up and coming (they are always either up and coming or emerging) artists the name is taken from Bilateria Triploblastic. Me neither. I wikipedia’d it. It’s a highly scientific denomination for organisms arising from three primary germ layered ova that possess bilateral symmetry – having a front and back and an upside and a downside. The press release simplifies this definition as “possessing both a mouth and an anus.”
So why not call it Mouth and Anus? Or call it digestion? Perhaps that wouldn’t provide the snobbery and pseudo scientific resonance of using latin/scientific terminology. Its not like Bilateria is in the common vernacular is it?
Who were they expecting? Virgil? Juvenal? Pliny the Elder? Or perhaps a group of biologists specialising in embryonic development of the digestive tract in vertebrae?
