Mary Wakefield, writing this week’s Diary column for the magazine (remember: subscribe!), deplores the Art Fund’s appeal for public subscribers to help purchase Yinka Shonibare’s Victory in a bottle so it may be displayed at Greenwich:
To each their own; Shonibare’s work seems playful and even fun to me. But does it really have anything to say about the “triumph of ethnic diversity over pallid, monocultural imperial Britain”? Perhaps it does. Consulting (where else?) the Guardian for illumination on this point, I discovered that some folk do view the bottle ship in this fashion.Every day, except when it’s raining, I cycle to work through Trafalgar Square and pause to gaze at the ship in a big plastic bottle on the fourth plinth. What makes it so horrid? The ship is a scale model of Nelson’s Victory with sails made of an African print and I’m told it symbolises the triumph of ethnic diversity over pallid, monocultural imperial Britain. But that doesn’t make it pretty.
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