What Would Neil Young Do?

Poster by Jeremy Deller
Glasgow’s Modern Institute Museum

From Getty Images Blog:

“What would Neil Young do?” has that well-meaning, all-purpose flexibility that straplines like “think different” have. Its tone is a mix of the cheeky and the high-minded, serious but also a little wry.

I laughed when I first saw the poster because I recalled Neil Young telling his biographer James Mcdonough that when he was young he used to ask himself “…what would Bob Dylan do?…”

Ansel’s take was that Jeremy Deller was playing with the common US bumper sticker ‘What would Jesus do?”

I prefer to think that Deller is a Neil fan, has read the Bob Dylan story, has heard Neil’s trenchant ‘Living With War’ album and has conflated all the above with the Jesus bumper sticker thing.

After six hours of wandering around the Art Fair on the way home on a packed Underground train, an empty seat appeared.

I gestured to a woman with a handful of bags standing up beside it to sit down. She shook her head. I gestured again, she said “no thanks” so I sat down, wondering whether I should really have insisted, whether she was just being polite, and I’m sure it sounds daft, but in my self-conscious embarrassment I couldn’t help thinking, “What Would Neil Young Do?”

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