Some top art wanker self-parody here

Your comment is remarkably obtuse, if I may say so. The object of the poppies was almost exactly the opposite of metaphor. It was to offer a moving and visual idea of the reality of a number - an artistic counterblast, if you will, to Stalin's vilely cynical 'A million dead is a statistic'.

There are also a bundle of other possible interpretations, all of which seem to have been entirely discounted in favour of the obvious and pretty trite one.

These chaps are sooo obvious.

into an idiomatic shorthand. Everyone knows without even thinking what the poppy means, so nobody's having to make the imaginative leap that is inherent to metaphor anymore.

And it is perhaps trite to demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of dead people is a f**k of a lot of dead people, but that doesn't lessen the impact of its demonstration, does it? You might as well say that the symbolism of throwing dirt onto the coffin of a loved one is 'trite'. It is, but it nonetheless remains real, profound and affecting.

I thought he was making a clever Shining-esque point to do with blood spewing forth from the home of the crown jewels for a moment, then I realised he wasnt and it's essentially just another piece of pulp public art.

Dont get me started on the whole burial business either

Besides, I was under the impression that only a couple of people knew what my username was on there.

accessible to all while remaining visually stimulating and thought-provoking.

Sounds like exactly what good public art should be to me. :shrug: