Of course, the club executive were too straight to notice. When the design came back from the artist, they believed it was a standard, pretty safe design actually: a lion and a football. This is just what had been requested – nothing contentious or out of the ordinary and no expensive, unnecessary detail (furled scrolls beneath unicorn’s hoof and the like). The design was passed immediately and unanimously. What they could not know, however, being the absolute squares they were, was that the designer was Serbia’s No 1 Elvis superfan and their club badge is an oblique tribute to his hero.
All the clues are there when you look for them: the King, of course. The sexy dancing. The view censored below the waist because of his pelvis. It was staring them all in the face. Also Elvis was known to like lions and preferred watching nature programmes on television if they had lions in. He once stormed out of the room in the middle of a lovely afternoon with The Hollies at Graceland because the nature programme they were watching was all about insects and plants.
Of course, the insidious inclusion of a personal comment into a public work of art is something artists have been doing for a long time. Next time you view Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, look out for the little pot of aniseed on the edge of the table – aniseed was never used in fried egg preparation in Spain at this time; this was Velázquez telling the King what he thought of the contemporary tax on horse hair. Cameron Carter