These three images sum up my attitude towards those who don’t know sh*t about science and the scientific method but seemingly know everything about its failings (yes, religious people, I’m looking at you too):
Skeptical Voters believe that evidence should be at the centre of all public policy making. This site intends to identify which parliamentary candidates embrace the use of evidence as a means to inform their decisions and which prefer to obfuscate, ignore or suppress the evidence for political convenience.
Not a surprising development, after the recent David Nutt affair. However, it does assume a public that always employs critical analysis and doesn’t just believe everything the tabloids say (or celebrities).
Via the Herding Cats blog, which is dedicated to innovations in project management (wake up!), I came across the US Department of Energy Project Management Policy and Guidance site which includes a surprisingly good document on earned value management. It’s somewhat wordy and the progress reporting templates come across as bureaucratic and excessively detailed (the way Governments seem to like their reporting) but it’s still worth a read.
Earlier in the year, when I was working in Holborn, London, I’d often walk back to the station across Waterloo Bridge and down along by the Thames along the South Bank. This one summer day I saw the trees had been wrapped in what seemed to be red material with white dots.
It turned out to be an art installation by Yayoi Kusama called ‘Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees’.
However, what caught my eye was the dichotomy of a little sign saying:
Do not draw or write on the trees
… and the fact that the public seemed to have ignored that and scribbled words or messages on every white dot on practically every tree.
It made me wonder about something I once read on the subject of art in public places that ended with the statement ‘What makes good art does not necessarily make good public art‘. The example it used for this was a work by Richard Serra (though it could equally be applied to all his works). I felt, though, that the debate had moved on since then from whether an artwork was considered attractive or appropriate in its surroundings to the relationship between the artwork and the public. Isn’t public art not only for the public’s benefit but a creation that is so deliberately put into the public environment that direct interaction with it not only happens but should be expected? Hence the irony of the ‘Do not draw’ sign that included the line:
This is an art work. Please respect it.
Isn’t interacting with it and bringing it closer to the public sphere the best example of respect? Should all public art be Olympian in its aloofness and inaccessibility, to be admired only from afar? That wouldn’t engender my respect. Think of the four plinths in Trafalgar Square. The first three have military sculptures that no-one pays any attention to and only a tiny fraction of the public could even tell you who they are of. The fourth is a pure example of public involvement.
Another example is in this article Two very different takes on public sculpture and art from the site 37signals that compares public art in Chicago and Seattle. From the article:
Chicago understands public art in a public space. The public will only be interested if they can engage with it. Walk on it, play it in, look into it, touch it, brush up against it. If you go to Millennium Park you’ll actually see and hear kids playing over the place. I don’t think you’d see a single kid at the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park having a good time. I didn’t see any adults who were particularly interested either.
BTW I’ve been to Millennium Park in Chicago and it is indeed a fantastic place. Terry liked it too.
BTWBTW Contrary to some opinion, that photo of Terry in my last entry was not of him dead - he was just asleep and often had afternoon naps like that. He also hated me taking a picture of him asleep (which is why I did it).
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