Hi All:
A wonderful example of Al Capp's biting critique of modern art ("A product
of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered")
recently arose with the introduction in Briton of the logo for the 2012
Olympics.
You can view the logo and read reaction to it at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/olympics2012/story/0,,2095524,00.html
Here are some excerpts from an article about the logo in today's NY Times:
LONDON, June 6 - It was said to provoke epileptic seizures. Someone
compared it to a broken swastika or "some sort of comical sex act between
'The Simpsons.' " The mayor was not amused.
The rollout of London's new logo for the 2012 Olympics, in other words,
has not been an unalloyed triumph.
Two days after it was introduced on Monday, the logo - a composition of
subway-graffitilike, jagged-edged cutouts roughly denoting the figures
2012, in pink and yellow - has become front-page news. One newspaper, The
Sun, ran a competition to discover whether amateur designers - two of whom
it identified in its pages as a monkey and a blind woman - could do
better.
An online petition gathered 35,000 signatures to protest the logo and
demand that it be replaced. But perhaps the brouhaha evoked some other
considerations, most notably concerning Britons' ambivalent attitude not
just to winning the right to stage the Olympics, but also to dealing with
innovation, design and success itself.
The logo "is not simple, it is not memorable, it is not beautiful," the
columnist Magnus Linklater wrote in The Times of London. "It is bound to
be a success."
To the 2012 Organizing Committee, "the new emblem is dynamic, modern and
flexible."
An animated version on a Web site was withdrawn after advocacy groups
representing people with epilepsy said that flashing lights provoked more
than 10 seizures among the estimated 23,000 people vulnerable to a photo-
sensitive form of epilepsy.
The display was withdrawn, but the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who
had reportedly refused to endorse the logo, also took issue with the
$800,000 tab for designing it without a study of its impact.
"If you employ someone to design a car and it kills you, you're pretty
unhappy about that," he said. "If you employ someone to design a logo for
you and they haven't done a basic health check, you have to ask what they
do for their money."
On Web sites, critics registered sharp opposition. "It resembles a
swastika and looks like graffiti - two things London is not about and
should not aspire to," said an opponent, Peter Donovan.
The organizing committee insisted that it would not withdraw the logo.
Indeed, Sebastian Coe, the committee chairman, called it "an invitation to
take part and be involved."
As a columnist, Jane Moore, wrote in The Sun, the Olympic organizers say,
"It'll grow on us."
"So does foot fungus," she added.
END
Progress in art? I don't think so.
Regards,
Platt
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