There was Superman in red leather boots, Ronald McDonald clutching a bottle of beer, and Santa Claus about to look through a pair of binoculars.
Posted on 08/14/2011 10:35:51 AM PDT by pricilla
There was Superman in red leather boots, Ronald McDonald clutching a bottle of beer, and Santa Claus about to look through a pair of binoculars.
A benign if motley bunch, you may think. But they were enough to provoke an international diplomatic rebuke, it emerged on Wednesday, after they featured in an impudent make-over of a Soviet war memorial. Members of Russia's government were said to be seething.
An unidentified street artist struck last weekend, daubing paint on a high-relief statue in Sofia, Bulgaria, to transform the monument's Red Army soldiers into a tableau of storybook characters. The artist's caption spray-painted on the statue read: "In step with the times."(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Those are not all super friends.
Ronald McDonald,Santa Claus, and The Joker.
Can’t tell some of the characters.
I’m with you %100.
If this was one of OUR war memorials I’d be seething so I understand what the Russians are feeling.
(but yeah..it IS funny!)
Not an evil one in the bunch.
Russia should come and get it out of there and take it home where it belongs.
He got the Superman logo wrong, it’s supposed to be a red S on a yellow background.
Ronald McDonald, patron saint of capitalism. And Santa Claus, too. Love it.
I get what the graffitti artist is saying AND why it makes russians mad. the artist is saying russian ideas are no longer valid and the new ideas are western(read american) consumerism at its worst.
If you think the graffiti is complimenting america, you are wrong. the graffiti denigrates both america AND russia. It was a very good stunt.
Yeah, we should send a delegation of Republicans over to clean the memorial ~ before the Russians get to it, and then just stand still for the Democrat party complaints about our having cleaned it (showing them to be the Nazi pigs we all know them to be).
Otherwise it's funny, but they should probably put the grafitti guys away for a very long time in something approximately a turkish jail in a more primitive part of the country.
True, but if you're gonna get picky, he probably should have painted Superman's and Santa's faces white, too. He did the Joker's and a few others' faces, why not Superman and Santa?
Overall, the defacement aspect is worthy of at least a reprimand -- one mustn't allow this sort of thing generally, because ultimately it backfires and makes for an untenable situation. But from an artistic and social-statement point of view, it's very effective.
I’m thinking the Captain America character on the right side might grate a little too!
Too late. From TFA:
The statue in Sofia, built to mark the 10th anniversary of Russia's "liberation" of Bulgaria in 1944, has been cleaned up. Police say they are seeking the culprit.
Probably most of the guys the artists thought about when they selected subjects were dead guys ~ who actually died so our people could work in factories building the instruments of war.
In general I strongly disapprove of the defacement of WWII memorials ~
I wonder if the graffiti-ist used paint that could be cleaned off without too much trouble.
The Bulgarians spent more time fighting the Nazis than they did the Soviets, and 5 decades worth of subservience to Moscow can't have made the average Bulgarian too fond of their Soviet 'liberators'. I expect that this memorial's days are numbered, as are most of the memorials to Soviet troops in the non-Russian portion of what was once the Warsaw Pact.
“In general I strongly disapprove of the defacement of WWII memorials”
I could not agree more. Deface or destroy the image of some political predator, like Lenin or Dzezhinsky? Sure. Deface or destroy a memorial to the Poor Bloody Infantry of any war?
No.
People can get used to such things ~ the Bulgarians would have all gone to the ovens but for the slovenly, imperfect, and brutal Red Army troops. I think they will all get used to this one.
Now, Russian memorials in former East Germany, or Poland ~ that's a different item.
I agree with you, and I would extend that to most wars, with the caveat that it is traditional, when one country or group overthrows another, for the victor to celebrate their victory by obliterating positive images of the defeated one. I doubt very much that this graffitist qualifies in that regard, however. This was a social/artistic statement.
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