Igor Clark

Now look here. I might not like it, but I accept that iconography is of necessity public. I accept that the received perception of an image once representative of a cause, even if promoted to such status by an over-zealous or misguided personality cult, can and often will in time become one of an entirely detached symbolism pointing to events, operations, entities and episodes far removed from that cause and its original context; a sign for sign-readers of a different age, populating a world cracked across a semiological chasm neither of their making nor within their ken. I even accept, damn it, that if you want to engage the attention of an attention-deficient age, perhaps even with a grander purpose than simply shifting more units (such noble intention being behind this campaign, I'm sure), you must make bold, provocative statements; even, that sometimes the end might just justify the means, and EVEN that "yeah, well, it grabbed my attention, didn't it?"

I might not like any of it, but hey, I have to go along with it.

But HEAR ME NOW: do we HAVE to have that bearded bastard, that reverse Midas, that profligate populariser of the paltry, metamorphosed for sales purposes into a chimerical mutilation of something which once - for all its naïveté, for all its doomed idealism, for all its easily-deconstructed fallacies and its practical inapplicabilities, for all its collapse into the gutter of history - excitedly, blissfully, joyfully looked at the stars?

I suppose we do. I suppose we get the signs we sign up for.