LONDON 2012: Olympic posters are just too easy to mock

IT'S too easy to sneer at the collection of London 2012 posters revealed by Games organisers.

BRAINS: Ruth Mackenzie is the vision by the Cultural Olympiad, which is now known as the London 2012 Festival (Locog via Getty Images)

It's too cheap a shot to say a five-year old could have done better or that the Queen will not be amused by the latest additions to the Royal Collection - she is always said to prefer the old masters.

First there is Howard Hodgkins's abstract blue blob, which is supposed to be a swimmer but looks more like someone's tipped over the Toilet Duck.

Then we have Tracey Emin's hastily scrawled Paralympic love note with errant capitals and poor punctuation, forget art school, how about go back to school.

And then there is Fiona Banner's list of words, designed to describe a nude Paralympic cyclist, that include phrases straight from a 1970s porno or Jackie Collins best-seller, such as 'steely buttocks' and 'arse to knee'.

The material for mockery is just too plentiful and the targets just too peachy.

But not one of the posters features the word London or even Olympics - which probably, it will be argued, was exactly the point.

Private Eye's Pseuds Corner will certainly have a field day with the artist's respective descriptions of their work, while the majority will feel a numbing paralysis from their impenetrable analysis.

Only one poster includes the iconic Olympic rings symbol, Anthea Hamilton's Divers (see below) - although if Tom Daley entered the water at that angle and with his legs that far apart, he won't win any medals next summer.

POSTER ART: 'LOndOn 2012' by Rachel Whiteread and 'Love' by Bob and Roberta Smith, two official London 2012 posters

The best of the indifferent dozen is Rachel Whiteread's LOndOn 2012 design.

At least you can see some Olympic connection in the scattered rings and colours. 

Apparently it's supposed to look like marks left by drinking bottles or glasses belonging to celebrating athletes. As long as those bottles are Heineken, the official pissy lager of choice for next year's Games, Rachel wins.

Officials from the Olympic Delivery Authority and organising committee Locog have been talking virtually non-stop about legacy since July 6th 2005, the day London won the race to stage the Games.

Next year will see a 12-week nationwide festival of what organisers bill as the world’s best music, theatre, dance, visual art, literature, film and fashion. 

But where is the legacy or the return from the £100m Cultural Olympiad, £80m of which is funded by public money?

ART ATTACK: 'GO' by Michael Craig-Martin and 'Divers' by Anthea Hamilton, part of the official London 2012 poster collection

Every Games has one and they are almost universally ignored and derided, with the strongest criticism usually coming from the arts community themselves - and they've on the inside lugging stones about London's programme of cultural activities for years.

Back at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Canadian artists were behind a scheme called Corridart, a eight kilometre exhibit of artworks that the city mayor, Jean Drapeau, deemed so ugly that he had it torn down two days before the Games began.

Of course art has its place - London would be so much poorer without its globally-admired galleries, theatres, operas, ballets and concert halls. But it deserves to be more than a mocked sideshow to the Olympics.

And the Olympics doesn't need 'representational pictures of emotional situations' - answers on a postcard if you know what that means.

© Sportsbeat 2011

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MORE COLUMNS BY SPORTSBEAT'S JAMES TONEY

LONDON 2012: Lessons from the past after Olympic Stadium decision

LONDON 2012: Time for BOA to reconsider their stance on Millar and Chambers

LONDON 2012: Pseuds corner beckons for Olympic medal design

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