In a failed attempt to draw visitors, the work was re-designed by Carsten Höller to make it the world's longest slide.
Anish Kapoor's Arcelor Mittal Orbit with the world's longest slide, by Carsten Höller. Photo courtesy of Arcelor Mittal Orbit.
The mega-sculpture in East London co-designed by Anish Kapoor for the 2012 Olympics at the request of Boris Johnson, the former mayor of the city and now the UK’s prime minister, has seen a sharp fall in visitor numbers and is falling deeper and deeper into debt.
The Arcelor Mittal Orbit, as it is now called, has landed the London Legacy Development Corporation, which runs the park in which it sits, £13 million ($15.7 million) in debt as interest mounts on the loan provided by the Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal for its construction, according to the Art Newspaper. (Originally christened Orbit, the artwork is now named after the ArcelorMittal steel company, of which Mittal is chairman.)
Johnson, who selected Kapoor’s proposal following a design competition, envisioned Orbit as a major tourist attraction that would become a symbol of the city, akin to the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York.
But critics slammed the sculpture upon its completion, and the public wasn’t particularly enamored of it either. In 2016–27, 193,000 people visited the site. That number has plummeted to 155,000 in 2018–19.
The Olympic Stadium and the ArcelorMittal Orbit, on the right. Photo: Gerard McGovern/Flickr. Via Wikimedia Commons.
To boost attendance, Johnson insisted that Kapoor revamp the work to make it a more appealing attraction. The artist—who is not a fan of Johnson—wasn’t pleased, but proposed working with another artist, Carsten Höller, to turn the artwork into the world’s tallest and longest slide. When Höller’s addition to Orbit was unveiled in 2016, the price to visit the observation deck and slide to the bottom was £17.50 ($21), and organizers hoped that ticket prices would boost revenue.
Built in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London, the piece was designed by Kapoor with engineer Cecil Balmond. Orbit is the tallest work of public art in all of the UK, at a towering 376 feet.
At the time that he unveiled plans for the work, Johnson was confident the project would be successful. “Of course some people will say we are nuts—in the depths of a recession—to be building Britain’s biggest ever piece of public art,” he told the Guardian. “[But I am] certain that this is the right thing for the Stratford site, in games time and beyond.”
Here Are All of Boris Johnson’s Art Entanglements, From His Postmodern Plan for the Elgin Marbles to His Bitter Feud With Anish Kapoor
Among his biggest scandals is his affair with a high powered art consultant to Middle Eastern royalty.
Artist Anish Kapoor (l) and Boris Johnson, at City Hall in London, England. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
Boris Johnson, the newly elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, may not be the choice of most artists and art-industry denizens for the new leader, but Johnson has plentiful personal connections to the art world that have spilled over into his professional life. A former journalist himself with a tabloid bent, Boris has quite often become tabloid fodder himself for his extramarital dalliances, which have become very much a part of his public image.
A connection to art is firmly in the family for Johnson. His mother, the painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl, most recently had a retrospective called “Minding Too Much” in 2015 at London’s Mall Galleries, part of the Federation of British Artists. His brother Jo is a member of Parliament for Orpington and is married to Amelia Gentleman, daughter of the British illustrator David Gentleman. Boris’s first wife Allegra, whom he met while studying at Oxford, is the daughter of an art historian and specialist at Christie’s and is now an art teacher and activist in the Muslim community of East London.
Currently, Boris’s companion at 10 Downing Street is set to be his 31-year-old partner Carrie Symonds who graduated university with an art history degree in 2009.
Boris Johnson with David Cameron, (R)
during a UK general election campaign event in Surbiton, south London. Photo: Toby MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images.
Arts and culture has been a thread throughout Johnson’s public life. Boris himself served as shadow culture minister in 2004. In his semi-comical six-point plan to “save Britain’s arts” he weighed in on the long-simmering Elgin Marbles controversy, suggesting that “the Greeks are going to be given an indistinguishable replica of all the Parthenon marbles, done in the most beautiful marble dust to end this acrimonious dispute between our great nations.” The immortal fourth point was:
Fourth? I can’t remember what point four is. Ah, yes. We are going to convene a summit with Damien Hirst and the rest of the gang at which they are going to explain to the nation what it all means. Let us have a national ‘mission to explain’ by the Saatchi mob, which will be massively popular.
At some point during his second marriage to lawyer Marina Wheeler, Johnson became involved with the journalist Anna Fazackerley. When he was elected Mayor of London in 2008, he appointed her head of arts and culture at Policy Exchange where she served from 2008–2010.
Infamously, Johnson would go on to have an affair with Helen MacIntyre, an art history graduate from Edinburgh University who rose through the ranks of Christie’s before striking out on her own as an art consultant, with an eye on the Middle Eastern market, flying “to Qatar 16 times in 18 months, tapping into the Middle Eastern art market by brokering million-pound deals for the ruling dynasty” according to the Daily Mail. Her clients, the same article asserts, included “members of the Qatari royal family and Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani.”
Helen MacIntyre attends the Serpentine summer party at the Serpentine Gallery on June 28, 2011 in London, England. Photo by Nick Harvey/WireImage.
In 2009, when he was the Mayor of London, Johnson invited MacIntyre to be an unpaid consultant for the fundraising efforts to build Anish Kapoor‘s Olympic Park sculpture, ArcelorMittal Orbit, which McIntyre also had her then-partner Pierre Rolin contribute to, writing a check for £80,000.
Rolin later regretted the association with Johnson, taking to the Evening Standard in an article called “How I Was Cuckolded by Boris Johnson.”
MacIntyre’s daughter Stephanie is widely reported to be Johnson’s “lovechild” (MacIntyre lost a suit attempting to keep the paternity secret in 2013, with the court ruling that Johnson’s morality made it a clear matter of public interest). “They [MacIntyre and Rolin] split up after Stephanie’s birth in November last year, when the newborn’s wild blonde hair and blue eyes raised doubts that she could be the dark-haired Rolin’s child, and a DNA test confirmed she wasn’t,” a 2010 Daily Mail article claimed.
The ArcelorMittal Orbit at Olympic Park on August 2, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
After the Olympics, the $24 million public sculpture dubbed “Boris’s folly,” was losing thousands of dollars per week in visitors fees, so the Mayor insisted on adding an attraction to boost the numbers. Speaking to theTelegraph, Kapoor said that the “Mayor foisted this [slide] on the project” and that instead of “going to battle with the Mayor,” he enlisted the help of fellow artist Carsten Holler to design a “more elegant, more astute” option. The whole endeavor became a huge point of contention between Johnson and Anish Kapoor—who yesterday sent artnet News an unflattering and graphically NSFW cartoon of Johnson following the Tory election results.
In 2016, when Holler’s slide was successfully installed to snake between Kapoor’s labyrinthine scaffold-like public sculpture, the artist, a Remainer, told reporters wryly, “We’re hoping Boris will be the first one down, and that this is Europe when he gets to the bottom.”
