10 Membranes

Anish Kapoor looks likely to win the competition to design an enormous statue for the Olympics, trumping amongst others Anthony Gormley. I am pro-statue and pro-Kapoor so goody. However the news is always accompanied by the claim that the Mittal funded east London piece will trump a Peter the Great statue in Moscow as the tallest in Europe. See above. When I stayed in Moscow in 2008 the statue was opposite my hotel room; at the time I thought it was the most awful and ghastly piece of tat I had ever seen. Looking at again I still think. It’s completely bonkers. It’s tacky, kitsch and colossal. It’s out of place, ugly, a confused mesh of engineering and bad art built to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Russian navy. And thats why one can’t help but quite admire it as well. It’s so big and so bad that it’s good. As long as you don’t have to look at it everyday.