Artist says it is “a meditation on managed entropy”; council calls it “an unauthorised structure”
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | EC2. Still here. Still filing.
Sources: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Art Has Responded to the Crisis
In response to the widely discussed report on managing Britain’s decline, a mural appeared overnight on the side of a former print shop on Redchurch Street. It depicts Britannia — the helmet, the trident, the determined expression — sitting at a laptop, reading the report, and surrounded by seventeen browser tabs, a cold cup of tea, and a notification that says “your subscription has been downgraded.”
It is, I think you will agree, extremely good. The artist, who goes by the name “Provisional,” has not spoken to press. The council has issued a notice. A gallery in Mayfair has already inquired about acquiring it for what one suspects would be a sum that would fund the things the mural is lamenting.
The Question Nobody Can Answer
Is it satire, or is it just true? This is the fundamental problem with the decline conversation at the moment: the gap between satire and reportage has narrowed to the point where a mural of Britannia checking her declining metrics is indistinguishable from a slide deck produced by the Treasury. Both exist. Both are accurate. Only one of them costs twelve thousand pounds and hangs in a gallery.
Meanwhile the street fills with people photographing the mural for Instagram accounts that will be seen by people who will not vote and will not move and will eventually explain to their children that they were there, in Shoreditch, when it all got very real, and it was, at least, very well documented.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/managing-britains-decline/
Art criticism at The Daily Mash
