Extraordinary Folly

The Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon Geoffrey Cox has criticized a £500,000 Arts Council project for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad as an "extraordinary folly" (title link). Quite right too. But what he should be asking his colleagues at Westminster is: "What half-wit gave this quango a budget to create inartistic tosh for the Cultural Olympiad?" The Arts Council is long on bullshit and short on artistic merit. For years it has wasted public money on daft projects it claims are "art". Nowhere Island is merely the latest folly in a long line of follies. The rationale for this tosh is to open up a debate on global warming. (Too late!) A retreating glacier on the Svalbard peninsula in Norway has exposed an island previously covered in ice. The project leader and volunteers sailed off on a schooner to nick six tonnes of material from this island. You can see it bagged up in the photo above. This will be used to create Nowhere Island - a "remarkable visual sculpture" claims Arts Council England - which will be floated along the South West coast next year for punters to sneer at (CLICK). How to waste money without really trying!