Bottoms Down

Sincere apologies to all those offended by the image above which appeared in my article "Demise-of-The-Co-operative-Group-Part-7-Where-do-we-go-from-here?".

I had no idea this image would upset readers more than the content of the article itself. If anything, I thought the image of Terry Jones super-stuffing himself would be the offensive one. But I take the point. I don't put a huge amount of thought into the images. I think there's a sort of subliminal random association thing going on which often surprises me as much as any potential reader. Perhaps I should pay more attention.

To be fair, it is “art” (Ms Jeanne Lorioz - born France 1954, studied at ‘Ecole Superieurs des Arts Appliques’, Paris) and so, technically, shouldn't be offensive. I actually quite like it as I find it to be (I think as intended) concurrently humorous and sombre.

Nor is it's placement entirely gratuitous, as at least one critic seems to suggest, insofar as regular readers may recall that there is a theme running through my articles in which I loosely associate the term “corporate independent professional” with the term “arse”. I did edit the image by excluding (perhaps not enough of) the top half (Jeanne, je m'excuse) because I was trying to achieve gender neutrality.

But clearly, if the image has deterred or distracted readers (although, strangely, my blog stats on this one are showing a higher readership than usual), I have failed in my good communication obligations.

With this in mind, I respectfully invite and urge my detractors (or anyone else) to post, in this discussion thread, any image or images they think would be more appropriate. I hereby undertake, as a committed democrat, to changing the current image with which ever of the proposed ones receives the most “likes”.

Does this sound fair?