Killjoy Critic Norman Lebrecht calls for Chinese pianist Yuja Wang to put more clothes on.

uja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts.

Tap “Yuja Wang” into your phone and you’ll get the full flaunty. Yet, under present rules of permitted speech, it is not supposed to affect our judgement of who she is and what she does. Well, let’s breach that taboo and see what happens.

First things first. I would not be wasting space on Yuja Wang if she was not an outstanding pianist, breathtaking in late-modern and post-modern music. She plays Prokofiev with a verve envied by Russians and Ligeti with a wit that eludes Hungarians.

In the post-Covid return to normal, she is a top draw at top venues. At Carnegie Hall’s reopening gala, it was Yuja Wang who got the star spot, not Lang Lang. That is how fast she has risen. Deutsche Grammophon, the premium record label, jumps to her bidding. If she wanted to play Stockhausen on a spinet, it would sell out within hours. She can do as she pleases. Why, then, does she use bare cheek to distract from the music?

The speed of her ascent may have something to do with it. Raised by party-member parents in Beijing, she went to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing at nine years old and to Canada at fourteen to learn English. The venerable Gary Graffman at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute took her on as his protégée, as he had done once before with Lang Lang, though the pair could not be more dissimilar. Where Lang Lang was a born showman, Yuja Wang just wanted to get on stage, play fast and get off. Her discovery of skintight gear, made by the Canadian designer Rosemarie Umetsu (who also tailors for Lang Lang) may have given her the confidence to hang around for flashlights and encores. …

To journalists who inquire about her outfits she says, “that’s what young people wear”. She’s not good at interviews, appearing easily bored or extremely naïve — which may be a diversionary tactic, a means to conceal whoever the real Yuja Wang might be.

“If the music is beautiful and sensual, why not dress to fit?” she teased Fiona Maddocks of the Observer. “It’s about power and persuasion. Perhaps it’s a little sadomasochistic of me. But if I’m going to get naked with my music, I may as well be comfortable while I’m at it.”

RTWT

This is the hardest checkmate I’ve seen in a while!! ♟ pic.twitter.com/jvvemMBhbD

— Jeremy Johnson (@jjohnson_says) November 1, 2021

Back in 2013, the FBI found a 91-Year-Old real life Indiana Jones, who’d been collecting archaeological artifacts all over the world over the course of a long life, and who had assembled a gigantic personal collection.

Recent laws, of course, have pretty much banned amateur collecting (professionals with degrees were jealous) and there’ve been also “Feel-good” bills requiring the repatriation of things found buried in the ground to the kleptocrat rulers of the chauvinistic banana republics from which they originated or mandating the return of human bones to any Amerindian group claiming them as “ancestors.”

Miller’s huge collection consisted of all kinds of things having an enormous variety of origins, but that did not stop the FBI. They showed up with a 100-page search warrant, threatened the doddering old guy with jail-time, and persuaded him to allow them to take anything they chose.

They took away 2000 bones and 7000 artifacts, so many that they had to set up their own temperature-controlled facility to house the stuff. And then they spent the next seven years repatriating objects to places like China! and Haiti (whose officials were puzzled because nobody had ever repatriated anything to them before and they had no idea what to do with the stuff). G-men also toted off bones to highly-remotely-connected Indian tribes so that prayers and food offerings could equip the ghostly owners of aged bones for passage to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

There’s the modern regulatory, bureaucratic state in action for you. If it isn’t compulsory, it’s got to be illegal. And nothing is too good for any whining identity group or bad cause.

Vanity Fair indignantly calls the late Mr. Miller a “grave robber,” but so isn’t every archaeologist?

Slideshow of 44 examples from Don Miller’s Collection.