LRB: Iain Sinclair - The Olympic Scam

'Much of this termite activity, the neurotic compulsion to enclose and alienate, justifies itself by exploiting temporary fences to use as masking screens, noticeboards for sponsors’ boasts, assertions of a bright, computer-generated future. In Laburnum Street, where a construction firm named Mace Plus is inserting a Close Encounters of the Third Kind space-platform school known as The Bridge Academy (an explosion of matchsticks, bubblewrap and extruded terracotta control modules), the surrounding fence boasts an exhibition of sanctioned street art: a pop-Hokusai novella of floods sweeping away the pencil-thin mosque and the abandoned Haggerston swimming-pool. A clever move: jazzy visuals, loud but on-message, pre-empt the attentions of spray-can subversives, class warriors, animal liberationists and wannabe Banksies hoping for exposure in the weekend magazines. There is no requirement now to use the rim of a derelict petrol station as an audition for a Hoxton gallery. As I said to a depressed realist painter with a unit near the London Fields railway arches: ‘The laughing crocodile splashed on your shutters is worth more than any of the stock you’ve accumulated over thirty years.’ Jock McFadyen, showing his edgeland retrievals in a Cambridge Heath Road car showroom, has taken to making painterly reproductions of graffiti cartoons found on canalside walls and condemned breakers’ yards along the broken perimeter of the Olympic Park.'

Wonderful stuff.

Link