Monday, June 11, 2007
Logorrhea
I don't understand the fuss about the 2012 Olympic logo.
It's not that I think the logo is amazing, it's that I have no idea what a 'good' logo would look like. I am also prepared to speculate that if those complaining loudest about it now had been honestly polled a fortnight ago, they would have been fairly apathetic about the issue. The logo controversy is part of a wider problem in Britain - people feel passionately about the Olympics, both for and against hosting it, but because there was no debate about whether applying would be a good idea at the time the decision was made, totally irrelevant and unimportant decisions like how the logo should look become disproportionately important as people with a vested interest in doing so use them as a stick with which to beat the government. Maybe there is a good case for demand-revealing referenda here. Personally, I suspect the government is not so much guilty of 'bad logo' as 'bad press relations' - would anyone really have cared if the logo had just emerged, quietly and unannounced, on official literature, as a fait accompli, instead of being trumpeted as a major achievement on the evening news?
It's not that I think the logo is amazing, it's that I have no idea what a 'good' logo would look like. I am also prepared to speculate that if those complaining loudest about it now had been honestly polled a fortnight ago, they would have been fairly apathetic about the issue. The logo controversy is part of a wider problem in Britain - people feel passionately about the Olympics, both for and against hosting it, but because there was no debate about whether applying would be a good idea at the time the decision was made, totally irrelevant and unimportant decisions like how the logo should look become disproportionately important as people with a vested interest in doing so use them as a stick with which to beat the government. Maybe there is a good case for demand-revealing referenda here. Personally, I suspect the government is not so much guilty of 'bad logo' as 'bad press relations' - would anyone really have cared if the logo had just emerged, quietly and unannounced, on official literature, as a fait accompli, instead of being trumpeted as a major achievement on the evening news?
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And, to be fair, it does look like something one of my 12 year old students could have come up with, for a hell of a lot lessmoney I'd warrant. And I mean the student who is bottom of the art class at that.
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