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Going under in Canary Wharf
Robert Mendick, Evening Standard26.09.08
It's a sinking feeling that banks at Canary Wharf sadly know only too well.
Just a few hundred yards from the European headquarters of bankrupted Lehman Brothers, a capsizing yacht forms part of an art installation that will be seen on the Thames and around the docks of London.
Two years in the planning, it is pure serendipity that a sinking boat should have been put in place in Docklands during the banking crisis.
The work, Love-Love, is by French artist Julien Berthier, who is pictured on board at South Dock. He will remain there for most of the weekend before abandoning ship and departing for Paris.
Lehman Brothers headquarters is somewhere over his shoulder among the skyscrapers that make up Canary Wharf.
The yacht has a motor and can travel up and down the Thames in its pictured state. It is understood the piece has been sold for about £50,000.
The installation forms part of Drift 08, the first art exhibition to be staged on the Thames.
It opens today and will run until 19 October and include artworks at Blackfriars, the Millennium Bridge and London Bridge as well as on a barge near HMS Belfast and on a buoy near the Globe Theatre.
The exhibition's curator, Caroline Jones, told the Evening Standard: "I always thought that the capsizing yacht is an optimistic piece because it never sinks."
The banking sector should at least take heart from that.
