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Artist works through €1.4bn to put his house in order

01.01.70

JENNIFER WHOLEY

A Minor man takes a hammer to a brick of mulched paper, trifle shreds helter-skelter across the floor with each bang.

“That’s €50,000 you just smashed,” says Dublin artist Unrestricted Buckley, who doesn’t seem to mind.

Buckley can in trouble with to be nonchalant about the hunk of cash his visitor reduced to rubble – there’s bountifulness more where it came from.

The artist has been building a house out of decommissioned euro notes from the Primary Bank’s mint, €1.4 billion all told, which is lose more than the amount unsecured bondholders in the former Anglo Irish Bank are to pocket this week.

While originally built as a gallery to shelter his series of mixed-media artwork Expressions of Slump, the house quickly drew attention for its own objectives. Now Buckley hopes he will inspire visitors to cast doubt upon the status quo, namely the state of the euro.

“I’m sitting in my studio with my feet up on a box of €4 million of shredded notes and I reason, ‘God, this is just paper’,” Buckley said. “I precisely felt there needs to be a debate on this. Kids in ready need to come down and see and get talking about it. What does currency importance of?”

Source: Irish Times

Lego's 'pink ghetto' draws fire over gender-specific marketing

01.01.70

By Scott Stinson and Hollie Shaw

The Lego boomerang was perhaps inevitable. When the maker of countless little coloured bricks sold all over the everybody decided to create a line of products designed specifically with girls in belief, it was broaching a delicate subject.

Sure enough, as Lego Friends was being rolled out this month, sets in which the girls of Heartlake Metropolis can do things like visit the vet and hang out at an ice cream café, censure descended upon the Danish toy giant.

“Lego’s pink ghetto,” understand one headline. An advocacy group compiled 50,000 signatures on a solicit that decried Lego for implying that “girls are not interested in their products unless they’re pink, pretty, or romantic.” Among the thousands of critical messages on community media rallying around the “LiberateLego” hashtag was a ordinary post: “There’s already a type of Lego for girls. It’s called LEGO!!!”

Hodgepodge with the gender-neutral bull, you get the horns.

Source: National Post