Public frightening the populists
It's sad that the Express & Star, a respected, unbiased newspaper, has fallen into line with the populist mob stoning The Public.
Your editorial (August 8) compared Wolverhampton Art Gallery with the The Public (traditional v modernist).
You would do well to check your archives around 40 years ago, about the visionaries then in charge of Wolverhampton Art Gallery and their purchases of contemporary art.
It caused an outrage. Public money down the drain etc.
Only mad people would pay £750 for a Warhol screenprint. Recently, a Warhol sold at auction for more than £80 million.
As always, today's shock of the new scares the living daylights out of the populist mob, or I should say the jockeys in the stand talking through their pockets.
Sadly, the modern becomes traditional and it's easy for me to visualise the same thing happening to The Public, but on a much greater scale.
Today's populist mob will be dead, buried and living in obscurity and tourists in their millions will be coming to gaze and wonder at this "shoebox" and its ever increasing fame.
Much like that iron skeleton and white dome in Paris, those coned boxes in Egypt and those orange segments in Sydney.
I wonder if the populist mob will be protesting outside Wolverhampton Art Gallery over the £6 million Lottery funding for its recent refurbishment of galleries housing their now world famous contemporary art collection.
Fred Barnfield, Rachael Gardens, Wednesbury.
