Are you a mosaic... | STFO 🤘

Let's end this week with The Times columnist James Marriott:

"When the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, described the newly opened Crossrail stations - those barren monochrome concourses - as modern "cathedrals," he was right, but the thought is depressing, not inspiring.

When I was a child, the old Tottenham Court Road station, with its escalators descending through Eduardo Paolozzi's mosaiced arches, seemed to me like a magic cavern.

It was unique to London. It only made sense there. The new Tottenham Court Road station, built for Crossrail, would not seem out of place in China or Singapore or America or anywhere at all. Nobody could find it really ugly or objectionable.

Our world is more tasteful than ever, an effect the internet has accelerated. The safest speech online is completely inoffensive. So is the most successful design. But art thrives on local oddness, eccentricity, and even offense. When WH Auden wrote that it was his "hope to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere," he spoke for all artists.

Beautiful things can be odd and uneven. They spring from local particularity and are not pre-engineered for the appreciation of a global audience."

Make no mistake: you want to be the Paolozzi mosaic in a world of lab-coat white subway tiles. Sure, some might find it odd, eccentric, weird, insulting, cheap, offensive... But that's the point.

That's how you stand the f*ck out.

(Credit to Richard Shotton for finding this gem.)