No smoking in bars produces art work
Today on the 10th January 2005 all smoking in bars and restaurants in Italy is now only allowed if there is a special room set aside for the smokers. An incredible step forward and one which should be loudly applauded and supported.
To celebrate this brave move which once again puts Italy back on course to taking its rightful place as the country of culture inside Europe, a local artist put up an installation of his work about smoking inside Aristodemo's bar in Barga Vechhia.
Ten year ago he spent months cutting out images from Panorama of people smoking. He assembled a collage of these images and constructed a curtain which was originally designed to hang in a school in the area. The work was removed from the school as some of the images included naked women. His reply that they were all from the magazine Panorama which was freely available and probably in most of the pupils homes was ignored.
The work was removed.
Finally after a ten year gap the work has surfaced once again. It is interesting to note that most adults fail to notice that in all the images there is a cigarette. ... an almost all children note this detail first.
More images of the work are here
1 Comments:
Alas! Visiting Italy will never be the same. There, as a smoker, I enjoyed capping off a glorious meal, wine and the related social rituals with an espresso and A CIGARETTE. Yes, smoking is bad for the health, but governments choose to look at solutions for the least invasive forms of air polution. Once, outside a restaurant in the U.S., a couple walking past me on their way to dinner, frowned at me as I exhaled a puff from my cigarette. They had just parked a Hummer in front of me.
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