Glittering Queen's head on Park Lane - trashy kitsch or a sparkling tribute?

There's a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on Park Lane. You can hardly miss it - at least at night.

Matt Marga's tribute to the monarch, One Million Queen.
To be fair, it looks a lot better on a sunny day.

As darkness falls, this literally flashy piece of public art catches the harsh LED headlights of the expensive cars which throng Park Lane. It shimmers all silvery like a Christmas tree decoration picked up in Poundland.

The piece in question turns out to be a tribute to the serving monarch on her 92nd birthday last year. The title is "One Million Queen" ("1MQ")  and it was made by Italian artist Matt Marga.  It's a massive object,  a portrait head made out 999,999 crystals sandwiched between sheets of glass, 3 metres wide and over 5 metres tall.

It must've cost a bomb to make this. Apparently it includes 53 real diamonds, to represent the Commonwealth states. And yet it looks a bit cheap. It's  a massive blow-up of that familiar profile of the queen seen on every UK postage stamp or coin of the realm. Then rendered in glittery stuff. That's it.

On a dull morning it looked as though the glitter had been mixed with a couple of pints of Thames mud before being squeezed between the four thick sheets of glass. No doubt it looks much more impressive when the sun's shining.

Rather like Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God" - a diamond-studded skull - you wonder whether there's some irony in the project.  Is it meant to be a comment on wealth and inequality? Or is it really just a straightforward tribute? If so you wonder how it was received by the object of this expensive adoration.

We're expected to believe that the reigning monarch is very careful with her cash, the Queen of Thrift and Austerity in person. Could this piece possibly be just a wee bit too tacky? Then again, is it perhaps showing us the reality - a display of absurd wealth, just like the actual crown jewels?

The location is perfect: it's very close to some of the most expensive hotels in the world, whch any day of the year will be filled with millionaires and billionaires and their families. It's also less than a mile from the Queen's London residence (another big display of dull excess, Buckingham Palace).

This famous avenue of glitzy hotels and luxury car showrooms has been the location for quite a lot of extravagant public art over the past few years, under a Westminster Council scheme to cheer up the sad central reservation. This new one replaces a more striking piece, sculptor Bushra Fakhoury's Dunamis, a 9 metre-tall sculpture of a man with a conical hat holding an elephant above his head by its trunk.

Much of the other stuff on this road seemed a bit too flashy, a bit over the top (see the entry on London's outdoor sculpture here) - but perhaps fittingly so for a road where people gawp at sports cars costing as much as a small house in Battersea.

And, as always, few yards away, in the subways to the underground car-parks, and even more up around the fountains at Marble Arch, hundreds of homeless people congregate, huddled against the icy spring winds.

Filthy rich cities drive creative types over the edge

Fascinating piece on the baleful influence of the super-rich on the cultural life of their favourite cities on the Al Jazeera website this week.

Sarah  Kendzior's article quotes Patti Smith's advice to young would-be artists and musicians thinking of coming to New York City to kick off their careers. The advice - quite simply - is, "Don't!" She and another ageing musician of punkish origins, David Byrne, make the obvious point that cities like New York and London have become "unliveable" to all but the richest one percent. Everyone else is there on sufferance to serve the needs of the super-rich, and then to fuck off back to their miserable ordinary little lives in the outer suburbs.

We've had strong versions of these arguments many times before - recently with that last UB40 generation in the early 1980s, that end-of-the-dole-queue poet era, when you could live in a Brixton squat one week and the next be presenting some new Channel 4  arts prog.

In those days, there were still cheap bits of London that penniless arty-types could flee to. Once Camden and Notting Hill became too pricey, they moved East sand colonised Hackney, SHoreditch, Bethnal Green and Bow.

And now that these areas have themselves become plums in proerty developer portfolio, so the struggling arts types shift to south-east London, Peckham for example, or north-east out to Hackney Wick and Walthamstow.

We've also had the "Occupy" protests in London and other cities.

But Ms Kendzior's piece goes well beyond these anger-fuelled attacks on the new rich and the bankers, the property-billionaires. She digs deeper into the meaning of creativity, and why cities - which once were fertile breeding grounds for artistic movements - are fast becoming the reverse of this.

In NYC there's a company, Sitters Studio, which hires out artists to work as sort of cultural nannies to the children of the most affluent - "This is the New York artist today: A literal servant to corporate elites, hired to impart "creativity" to children whose bank accounts outstrip their own."

The vile reality is that "creativity" in the plutocratic circles of these world cities is encouraged, or at least tolerated, if it can be seen as a useful commodity, one that might help their kids make even more money in business or the professions.  They love creativity when it is applied to accounting and tax bills.

But when it comes to taking risks, or to attacking the values on which the moneyed depend, their attitude to "creatives" can change very quickly. All this media talk about "edgy" fashion and movies and music, well it only goes so far. They love "edgy" when it  makes them look smarter and sexier than their peers, but only when does not threaten their wealth.

But if - as say in the case of a Hirst dot painting or an Emin bed - edgy can earn them handsome profits at auction, then bring it on!