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Sun, 4 Jul 2010

100,000 visitors a year? Really?

Some bumpkins reckon that an art installation will attract 100,000 visitors a year to Dorset. They say this in an attempt to justify the artwork.

In this, they are wrong on at least two counts> First, popularity is not a good measure of artistic merit - consider how well "RnB" "music" sells, or how inexplicably expensive some of Damien Hirst's awful work is - and art does not need such jusitification, at least not if it's any good. And second, they're wrong about the number of people who will bother to go along to this ridiculous "observatory".

What's more, it won't bring "millions of pounds into the local economy". That would imply each of the 100,000 people they reckon will visit would spend at least 20 quid to do so. They won't. The only people who will bother looking at the silly thing are a handful of people who were going to visit the area anyway.

In practice, this is nothing but a make-work project cleverly put together by the artist, who will no doubt be hoping for lots of extinctions so he can be paid to add more and more pointless chunks of stone.

Posted at 19:29 by David Cantrell
keywords: art | silly
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