Flypaper
Essay on - Flypaper The perception of what art is varies from culture to culture, even from one person to another. The fact is, in this day and age, art is such a wide variety of things, we cannot classify what is art, and what is not. We have people in very different fields of work calling themselves artists. And today’s artists do not just express themselves in the traditional form of sculptures, paintings or music. For example karate or taekwondo is a martial art, graffiti is art, although it is made with spray cans in stead of brushes, and even plastic surgeons consider themselves to be artists. But no matter what kind of art an artist makes they all have at least one thing in common; they create a product to make people react to it. The most popular reaction today seems to be provocation. It looks as though art-ists are striving to see who can be the most provocative. Either way they are all people who want to express themselves in the way they love. And then we have those people who try to benefit from other’s talents, for exam-ple managers, agents and promoters (to mention the mildest cases). And we have the people who oppose any kind of art that they don’t like; critics, who benefit from other peoples’ failure. This also seems to be the case in the text “Flypaper”. We meet the anonymous artist who produces illegal but deeply valued pieces of art such as a hand- or footprints in wet cement, sealed off with a print of his right thumb in red wax. And then we meet council leader Perry, who sets out to catch the “criminal” artist but end up being the cause for him dying instead. The setting is a town environment in northern England, in a time like today. In the beginning of the text we are informed of the background for the rest of the text. We get a long description of how the anonymous artist works and how eve-ryone is trying to reveal his identity. Then we get take a jump in to a more definite frame of time. Suddenly we are in council leader Perry’s office. He has just got his latest popularity ratings, and it does not look good. We can tell by the following dialogue that he has already tried to improve them and he decides, what ever he has done before, it was not enough.