Mind the art ... commuters walk past Cindy Sherman's work at Gloucester Road underground station in 2003. Photograph: Martin Godwin
I am delighted that Tom Service has brought the Washington Post's original experiment in public art to more general notice.
Tom makes the point that context is vital to art: we know we're going to hear something special in a concert hall or see something wonderful in a gallery so we adjust our critical faculties accordingly. But art is all around us, and not in the post-modern, post-Andy Warhol, aesthetics-of-everything sense. Actual art, made by real artists, on our very own Tube network.
Platform for Art is London Underground's attempt to perpetuate the artistic legacy of the Tube, which dates from a century back and includes iconic designs like Harry Beck's original map and the poster campaigns commissioned from artists such as Man Ray and Graham Sutherland.
Currently certain stations are putting up specially designed posters. Gloucester Road has young Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima's City Glow, Mountain Whisper, a progression of landscapes installed under the arches of the District line platform. Digitally-created, the scenes are futuristic visions of harmony between man and the world, nature and technology, day and night, rural and urban.
If you're waiting in Knightsbridge station you would be forgiven for thinking you were actually in London Zoo. Heather and Ivan Morison have created Zoorama - a sound installation that plays an animal's calls over the station Tannoy, like regular platform announcements. This week's animal is a male cheetah, but Namibian elephants or Amazonian dolphins are just as likely to trumpet or squeak along the gusting tunnels. The animal motif is depressingly apt: what with commuters being packed onto trains like cattle.
Poems on the Underground is a more subtle campaign, featuring snatches of Shakespeare, a verse of Verlaine or an ode of Euripides. Each poem is simply printed on cards which are changed three times a year. As some have found, since the inception of Poems in 1986, these cards are eminently removable and can be just as inspirational at home. This does, of course, deprive them of their original purpose.
There is also a musical thread to art on the underground - the omnipresent buskers, now happily licensed and sponsored to ensure a minimum standard. Some are still turn-offs: no matter how skilled, I'm not going to give to a bagpiper. Ever. But the Ella-Fitzgerald-soundalike I heard recently at the bottom of the escalator in Leicester Square was stunning, and it's surprising how a harpist's version of Smells Like Teen Spirit can cheer up your day.
