Olympic Bells are Pants

Yesterday, we laughed our heads off and shook our heads in disbelief watching another wonderful, painstakingly, desperately embarrassing episode of TwentyTwelve (oh yes, you can love Shakespeare and appreciate the amazingly well-observed humour of that series... I have worked in offices, you know...). 
It was about a ridiculous idea by an idiotic "art director" to ring church bells across the country to celebrate the Olympics, and they had commissioned a compositor to come up with a "bells symphony" of some kind, then they had a well-renown "cool" artist getting the team to pick up some noisy objects from a bag and getting them to use the improvised "instruments" for one minute exactly as a kind of participatory action/event for the Olympics. We looked at each other and smiled at the cringe-inducing scenes. Hohoho, we thought. 

Ah, but then this morning, I read this in a magazine:

Martin Creed: all the bells work.
"Cement your place in history by becoming part of Turner-Prize winning artist Martin Creed's massive collaborative performance art project. At 8.12am sharp on the first day of the Olympic games, Creed wants you to ring any bell you can get your hands on hand, bicycle, door, whatever - for exactly three minutes to help welcome the Games to the UK. Sign-up online (you can even download a special bell-sound app to your phone) and get your wrists ready."


If we want people to appreciate art again in this country, maybe we should stop giving prizes and writing massive cheques to people like Martin Creed and the other Tracey Emins of this world. 
It's all (money-making) pants.