I recently visited an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London entitled The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns
More recently I was invited to speak to a conference entitled Risk culture for charities organised by the Institute for Risk Management.
I began my conference presentation with an overview of disparate risk-management cultures, offering examples of excessive risk aversion in the form of fatuous warnings of manifestly obvious directly perceptible risk. And I concluded with a cartoon that I felt made the point rather well.
Guindon, Detroit Free Press, 25 September 1994
As the profusion of signs warning of obvious and/or trivial risks grows, I suggested, the likelihood increases that warnings of serious/non-obvious risks will be ignored.
After my presentation, and after tea, one of the conference participants returned to report that every urinal in the mens toilets displayed the injunction Now wash your hands.*
The centrepiece of the Barbicans Duchamp exhibition was his famous urinal – signed R. Mutt 1917. I have long had trouble with Duchamps success in transforming it into a work of art. But work of art, or no, it clearly needs updating to keep up with modern risk management practice.
* He also reported that the man next to him departed without washing his hands.
