Powerful and truthful post on the illusions and fantasy of Glory. I was thinking of that death’s head by Dix when I wrote in an online Guardian article earlier this week that I would rather see the moat of the Tower of London filled with “barbed wire and bones” than the red ceramic poppies currently drawing huge crowds to see what has become the defining popular artwork in this centenary of the Great War’s outbreak. I called the sea of poppies now surrounding the Tower “toothless” as art and a “Ukip-style memorial” – to quote my words not in their original context but as they have since been republished in angry articles in the Mail, Telegraph and Times, with the Mail in particular denouncing me as a “sneering leftwing critic” and the Guardian for publishing my wicked words. Even the prime minister got drawn in at question time in the Commons. “Cameron defends ‘toothless’ poppy tribute,” reported Thursday’s edition of the Times. But my criticism of this work of art was and is reasonable, honest and founded not in some kind of trendy cynicism but a belief that we need to look harder, and keep looking, at the terrible truths of the war that smashed the modern world off the rails and started a cycle of murderous extremism that ended only in 1945. If it did end. I strongly believe that an adequate work of art about the war has to show its horror, not sweep the grisly facts under a red carpet of artificial flowers.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 12:37:23 +0000
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