Friday 18 November 2011

Occupy London: dead friends in high places

Talking of Burne-Jones, he hated St. Paul's, and his friends moved his memorial service to Westminster Abbey, because to the artist, St. Paul's was the symbol of capitalist and political triumphalism.
St. Paul's was a building that 'crushed and depressed' him both aesthetically and politically. He loathed its architectural pomp and emptiness and its status as the place of worship of the stock exchange, the bankers, the commercial world of London that Burne-Jones despised and loathed. It was nonsense, he decided, to put mosaics there, useless to try to do anything with so unpromising, corrupt and unsympathetic a building - 'but let it chill the should of man and gently prepare him for the next glacial cataclysm'. 
How times have changed. Quotation from MacCarthy's biography of Burne-Jones.

Occupy LSX has now taken possession of a USB building. More power to them.

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