The Happy Failure
A Norwegian singer was singing a wonderfully boring
song in the European Song Show in 1978. Many singers
from different countries were there. At the end of the
show people from each country
had to decide which song
was the best. They also decided which song was the
worst. Unusually they all agreed: ‘Norway gets zero out
of ten/
Next morning the newspaper stories were naturally all
about the Norwegian singer, Mr Teigan, while there were
only a few
words about the winning singer, Izhar Cohen.
After the show newspaper photographers crowded round
Mr Teigan, welcoming him like a popstar.
‘This is my greatest success,’ he said. ‘I have done
something that nobody has done before me. I’m the first
Norwegian to get zero. After
the show they asked me to
sing parts of the song sixty times for the photographers.
And I’m going to be on television and singing all over
Europe. People have never been so interested in me
before.’
The Funniest Modern Pictures
To understand modern pictures, you have to be able to
think in a free way about them.
Nothing has shown this
more than a Frankfurt show of works by an exciting new
painter, Yamasaki, in 1978. The man who was showing
the pictures, Mr Feddersen, wrote about Yama-saki’s
wonderfully
bright colours and strong, interesting
shapes. In only three hours, visitors bought all twenty-
two of the pictures for as much as £500 each.
28
Excitement grew when the
news came that the painter
was there and was ready to answer questions about his
work. You can guess how glad all the free-thinking
people were when Mr Feddersen brought in a
monkey.
‘He just threw paint all over the place,’ he explained.
He wanted the money for a
different kind of show in
which animals did funny things for children to watch.
Dostları ilə paylaş: