By Carter, there's a lot of comical Rubber Wool Cup hoo-hah around. All those ads, trying to turn our love of rugby and our loyalty to the gods/players into dollars for sponsors: buy Carter; get Carter. All those pricey bars and greedy landlords. All those graffiti-art-free walls. All those school swot-ups on the national anthem (happily, "in the bonds of Shortland Street" has replaced "Coronation Street" in the playground version).
I was naively hoping that one or two art-types would be poking fun at the whole money-grubbing, manipulative, jingoistic World Cup shebang - it's good fodder for satire, and art is traditionally a burner as well as a builder of sacred cows.
Take the phrase "All Black". It no longer belongs to the fans who helped make it so valuable as a "brand". Oh no, it belongs to commercial licensees as a "wordmark" and is then cynically sold back to genuine followers in the form of "official" merchandise.
When playwright Renee Liang approached the New Zealand Rugby Football Union for permission to call her new play The First Asian All Black, the reply was that she would need a formal licence, as book authors do. "While we're probably not in a position to subjectively judge the play, we would need to know how the All Blacks brand is being presented," she was told in an email.
Tee hee, I love the idea of the NZRFU board ruling on artistic merit. Take Foreskin's Lament (being read at Waikato Museum later this month). Would they have asked: "Nudity?! Whaddisit?" If anybody's writing All Black fan fic out there, take note: the email to Liang went on to admit that usually, once authors see the complexity of what was involved in obtaining a licence, "they have opted for a name change".