Friday 25 January 2008

Beijing Olympic Park

John Atkin FRBS - Strange Meeting (1999 & 2007)I suppose Coxsoft Art should congratulate John Atkin FRBS - Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors - for being selected from 2,600 applicants to create a new sculpture for the Beijing Olympic Park, but I don't like his work. He strikes me as another of those people with a diploma (MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art 1982 - 1985) who thinks if he calls it "art" it is art. His industrial flotsam doesn't attain "craft" as far as I'm concerned, let alone "art". But the Beijing judging panel gave his Strange Meeting (originally 1999, but revamped in 2007 for the competition) an "outstanding award". So much for art. The even worse news is that a similar waste of taxpayers' money will be inflicted on London for that next costly planet warmer and monument to narcissism the 2012 Olympic Games. The drugs companies should be made to pay. Better still, cancel it. All it's done so far is create dissension. And Londoners are footing the bill!

2 Comments:

At 16/6/08, Anonymous Anonymous said...

To give this sculptor a fair chance, I'll try to find his reasoning for this piece. Since there sem to be two parts, maybe that's the meeting, but I can't tell for sure. All I knowis that I (slightly) prefer the black version.

 
At 16/6/08, Blogger Unknown said...

He got the title and the idea from a war poem - Wilfred Owen, maybe - or story in which the ghosts of two dead soldiers from opposing sides meet and become buddies. Sounds a bit far-fetched to me. And what it has to do with an abstract design is anybody's guess.

 

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