Art can't stop wars, they insist, just as Picasso's Guernica was a "pathetic" statement in the face of the oncoming second world war.
Last week, Mr. Martin seriously misjudged the mood of the legislators when, making a formal statement in the face of public outrage, he failed to apologize on behalf of Parliament.
On Thursday, after the suit was dropped, Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said in a statement: "In the face of a powerful argument for the rights of free speech for authors and publishers, the plaintiffs wisely withdrew their action.
"It was closer than anticipated," he said of the vote, "but at the end of the day the truth prevailed and the members made a very affirmative statement in the face of the opposition".
Has no one told David Cameron that flaunting your foreign fun is about as charming as waving a bank statement in someone's face?
First, it is a political statement, an in-your-face version of a "Free Palestine" T-shirt.
In his classic statement of face, Goffman (1972, p. 5) reserves the notion of face to indicate only a person's self-image in terms of how the person in question is regarded by others: "The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact".
The trustees, who selected Mr. Silber as president on Tuesday, and those close to Mr. Westling disputed that, taking at face value his statement in his letter of resignation that he wanted to return to the classroom and let someone else begin a $100 million fund-raising campaign.
The story of rescues of passengers from the sinking ship is dribbling in in fragments, but enough is known to warrant the statement that facing death in the ocean there was no panic and this may mean that the despatches which intimate that the loss of life is appalling were born of great excitement and that many of the passengers are speeding towards safety on board the Virginian and Parisian.
"While the city's fiscal situation is improving," the mayor said in a statement, "we still face substantial out-year budget gaps that are increasingly difficult to close".
