Sometimes one wonders about the sanity of the people who are in charge of handing out (usually taxpayers´) money to contemporary art and artists. Consider for example this climate change "art project":
The Arts Council is spending a staggering £500,000 on floating a huge piece of Arctic rock more than 2,000 miles from Norway to England.
Once in the UK the newly-named Nowhereisland, which is the size of a football pitch and was only 'found' because of the partial melting of a glacier, will then be sculpted and toured 500 miles around the south coast.
The project, which forms part of its 2012 Cultural Olympiad, has been hailed by artists as an important and innovative way of looking at the dangers posed by climate change.
But critics have branded it a 'complete waste of public money'.
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Bristol artist Alex Hartley, 48, came up with the project after discovering a new island, which had previously been buried under a glacier but was now showing because of receding ice, on the Svalbard Peninsula in Norway in 2004.
He became fascinated with the area after realising he was the first man to walk on the island.
Seven years later he returned with a team of 18 volunteers to cut out the six ton section of rock, load it onto a schooner, and is now taking it back to Britain.
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The initiative is also supported by the Situations Arts team at the University of the West of England at Bristol.
Mr Hartley, who hopes the project will highlight the dangers of climate change by giving ordinary people a chance to become citizens of his new nation, said: 'My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens.
Read the entire article here
This waste of money comes at a time when UK taxpayers have to cope with a steep rise in the cost of energy, due to the government´s (stupid) climate change policy:
To meet our environmental targets, we will need to invest more in the energy sector this decade than Germany, France and Spain put together.
And paying for all that investment means higher profits for the energy companies. Paying for those profits means higher bills - £200 billion of investment doesn't come cheap.
Analysts at Citigroup have warned that the huge investment needed in the energy sector will require a real terms rise of more than 50% in our combined energy bills by 2020.
Read the entire article here
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