ELECTRIC SKY SIGNS

Evening Star, Issue 19002, 25 July 1925, Page 2

ELECTRIC SKY SIGNS

A protest by Sir Frank Dicksee, president of the Royal Academy, against, the ugliness and vulgarity ol electric advertising signs, has been warmly supported by leading English newspapers. He referred to Piccadilly Circus, which ho described ns the most vulgar place in Europe. “Men have hot,tied thousands of red-hot wires and strung them about the faces of (be buildings to celebrate the greatest victory of our age—the victory of vulgarily'over decent reticence. It is a modern miracle, this flameless bonfire. It is an auto-da-fe in which the victim is good taste,” says the ‘ Yorkshire Post.’ “ There is a place for everything. There is a right way of doing things and a wrong way-. The place for advertisements is not in public areas, where they are an ollenec to the eye find an onirage upon taste. The right way of drawing the attention of the public to a product is to enlist, the sympathetic consideration of the potential purchaser. The wrong way is to set his nerves on edge and place his temper upon a hair trigger by forcing the article upon in's-notice, wir.li or without His will, at moments when he desires rest and freedom from interrupt,ion. An isolated sky sign may be a. thing of beauty. Rut, an unregulated collection of sky signs arranged with an eye to nothing but a collective effect of insistent assertion, in which each sign is designed to outvie the next in its power of arresting the eye, and in which there is neither charm nor collective plan, can only be a. blatant desecration of the area upon which it inflicts itself.”