Martin Green, 2012 Olympics to the Hull City of Culture 2017…

Today I noticed that Martin Green, who appointed Danny Boyle and Thomas Heatherwick et al to design the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic games, has landed himself a new job. He is to spearhead Hull’s 2017 city of culture celebrations. See this Hull Daily Mail article:

London Olympics and Tour De France visionary Martin Green to oversee Hull City of Culture celebrations.

How interesting.

Especially in the light of this Guardian article which only appeared recently:

Row over Olympic cauldron design settled out of court

And this article in which Martin himself is quoted:

Cauldron controversy: why the Olympic settlement is a milestone for designers.

Martin says “Neither work by Atopia or anyone else played any part in the briefing I gave to Danny Boyle and Thomas Heatherwick at the beginning of the process to create the Olympic and Paralympic Cauldron,” ….. and … “The design for the cauldron came about solely from the creative conversations between Danny, Thomas and myself. Danny and Thomas have far too much integrity and talent to require using other people’s ideas in this way.” Hmmm… So that just leaves….?

This is the same argument used against my claims about the spiral mound idea as evidenced on this blog. That Danny Boyle is too talented to steal ideas is a ridiculous notion. Does Martin Green protest too much about not briefing the design team?

It certainly looks suspicious. LOCOG’s lawyers clearly didn’t agree that the Cauldron idea was not a stolen idea so they chose to settle out of court! Good news for ATOPIA.

However, there was also the glowing hospital beds from the NHS scene, stolen from a small london design firm. Here Danny Boyle is personally implicated having bought one of the beds from the designers in 1996 whilst considering using them for a film prop.

Then there is my Spiral mound idea. Submitted in 2009 to the Arts Council and LOCOG only to appear as part of the opening ceremony with no nod to its origins.

In the first article linked to above Danny Boyle says

“We tried to acknowledge all inspirations and contributions, great and small,” he said. “And whilst it’s inevitable some were innocently overlooked, I can assure everyone, the public, Atopia, Locog’s liquidators, judges, lawyers, that at no point did any of the creative team involved in creating the opening ceremony see or hear about Atopia’s work.”

Bit difficult to innocently overlook the inspiration for three major components of the opening ceremony eh Danny?

And Thomas Heatherwick is sticking to his guns, though he does detect some kind of conspiracy afoot:

“I knew nothing of this settlement until today,” he told the Guardian, “and it has no implication for any of the creative team. As we’ve said before, the design process was categorically our own, from start to finish. I can’t help but feel saddened by what seems like cynical timing to coincide with the opening of the Museum of London’s cauldron exhibition this week.”

I live in Hull which is to be the City of Culture in 2017. Martin Green is to spearhead the celebrations. What can we expect? Artists ideas stolen and given to his pals to execute? Jobs for the boys? I suppose we shall see.

I for one will be an eye on how this develops. I don’t think I’ll be getting any funding crumbs for my contribution to the City of Culture anyway, do you?