As Kermit the Frog liked to remind us, ‘It’s not easy being green,’ and that applies to some ambitious but unfortunate artwork in the Netherlands.
In the most recent incident, the clean-shaven stairs in the picture above were the accidental creation of a Utrecht municipal worker who, apparently concerned that weeds had overtaken a public staircase, grabbed his weed burner and corrected the situation.
Unfortunately, the ‘weeds’ were a carefully-nurtured project to create a green artwork with living plants; three years of work were destroyed. The artists and sponsors plan to try again. This time with more signs.
Last year, in Rotterdam, council workers accidentally mowed a field outside the natural history museum which was part of a project to promote wildflowers, bees and butterflies.
And if you think this sounds like the hand of the devil at work, you’d also have to think the devil has gotten his comeuppance. The green statue above, all nine metres of it, blew over in a strong wind near Lelystad after standing since 1993. Known as the Tongue of Lucifer, it’s been vandalized twice by copper thieves before the wind did its work. It will be back in place next month, but provincial councilors have ruled it must now be called simply ‘The Tongue.’ They are done with the devil.
