Niedźwiedzie ikony narodowe

While huge herds of painted fiberglass cows of Cow Parades […] represent cows as such, they are different everywhere and show artistic inventions of mainly local artists, the bears of international action United Buddy Bears […] are not bears at all, even the Russian or German ones. Of course, their figures are bear-shaped and they look like huge bears (2,2 m tall), but all of them are similar and they stay the same during their travel round the world […]. First of all I analyse circle structure and alphabetical order of the Buddy Bears action, which depends on the urban conditions […]. The meaning of alphabetical order one can notice only knowing the names of the countries in other languages and seeing radical disagreement between this order and his/her geographical mental map − then it sounds according to the main idea of the action United Buddy Bears: ‘each of places and each of neighbours are equal’. […] Nevertheless, some important questions remain open. How do we (as foreign public) recognize and identify painted images? Do we understand them properly (against the pressure of our native language, culture and experience)? Do the visual proposals become for us the icons of that country and, eventually, do we memorize them without a helping camera?