“(…) My dictionnary goes on to say that color also signifies authenticity, as in “He showed us his true colors”. Yet does not the very phrase “he showed us his true colors,” venerable with age and usage, also suggest the oppostite, that color is both true and untrue precisely beacuse of its claims to authenticity? How can you ever be sure with which variety you are dealing, his true colors or his fals ones? Is this why we in the West are drawn to color, yet made uneasy, even repelled by it, as by Mafia types like me in Hawaiian shirts? Who of you reading this text would even dream of painting the living- room wall bright red or green, or any color other than off-white? Then, safe in your whiteness, you can hang a wildly colored picture on the wall, secure in its framed being. “ M. Taussig, What Color is Sacred?, University of Chicago Press (1 mai 2009).
