I have a lot of love for art, but there's a time and a place for it. Trafalgar Square during 2012 isn't, in my opinion, the time or place where we should be apologising for our country's heritage by letting 2 Swedish sculptors put this in.
Yes we were dickheads in colonial times, but we put ourselves down too much, it makes us look like a joke.
I'm amazed there is so much adverse reaction to this sculpture.
Sure, you can read it as being mocking or self-deprecatory, but you don't
have to read it that way. Other ways of reading it include:
- as a salute to innocence and a celebration of happiness
- a poignant reminder that the future is yet to come, whatever it may bring
- a nod to the fact that all these generals and whatnots were once children too, they had then their own hopes and dreams - were they ever fulfilled?
- the possibility that this young lad in, say 1904 or thereabouts, grew up to become the Unknown Soldier, who no statues were ever made of
I don't see that is necessarily (or even obviously) jocular or irreverent. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I like it.
