If one goes to the Library of Congress Jefferson building and looks in a general upward direction basically anywhere in the building, they will realize that something major has been lost when it comes to public art. Spending money on that type of work would feel ridiculously extravagant to the average tax payer today, even though we already spend ridiculous sums on less appealing public spaces.
We should absolutely have all the brutalist advocates hanged, I agree, but as a general rule for public buildings globally, the more ornamentation, the less the people making it earned and the worse their lives were.
I do have some thoughts on mass production of patterned brick and cement tiles with relief molding, I think it'd go a long way towards making it inexpensive to build pleasant-looking housing and commercial spaces, but statuary and complex stonework are a whole different ballgame.
Brutalism can be done well and in an inspiring way, but it is rare. Boston City Hall is made fun of all the time but the interior is genuinely awe inspiring. It feels like it could have been built millennia ago or millennia in the future.
I’ve been in a dozen-odd brutalist buildings and never found the interiors awe-inspiring, but even if true... most of the citizenry will spend no or little time inside them. We owe the masses something that doesn’t look terrible from the outside, by their lights. Not those of the NYT’s architecture critic.
Au contraire. Death to brutalism (ugly) and neoclassical (tacky when new); upwards with nice, post-2000 blue-ish glass cubes with a pleasant pedestrian interface with the public realm. Architects today are doing nice things, unlike in the 60s and 70s.
The plaza it’s in is pretty bad though. It’s one of those classic windswept open spaces with nothing to do but skateboard, so they put up signs saying “no skateboarding” and thus no one uses it.
It’s kind of hilarious, because around Faneuil Hall it’s always teeming with people (including lots of tourists) and street performers, and then you cross the street to the City Hall and surrounding plaza, and it looks everyone has recently fled a zombie attack.
They've done good work revitalizing that plaza in the last few years! It's much more gardened, there's a genuinely terrific and original playground that I love taking my kids to (and which is home to the now-nationally-famous "cop slide"), and the parts that remain bare brick host occasional craft fairs and beer gardens and the like. They could do more, but it's night and day from when I first moved to Boston.
I endlessly enjoy the topic of "what modern buildings actually look good?" My favorite modern building is the Vertical Forest in Milan. I love a good 'belle epoque' building as much as the next person, but trying to recreate them in our era almost always look tacky and jarring. Case and point, that abortion of a Whitehouse Ballroom.
Most new office buildings actually look good. One Vanderbilt, Salesforce, all of Hudson yards, new JPM, everything in the City of London post-2000, Tour Triangle, Azabudai Hills, etc. are all great.
I remember seeing so many renderings of that Bosco Verticale going around when the building was designed, and I was skeptical that the real thing could be as good. But in 2019 I was on a trip to Italy and had one day in Milan, so I prioritized seeing this building over the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele or La Scala or the Last Supper, and it was actually great!
It is not “cringe” to pander to mass tastes, it is simply good and right.
America is a democracy and you are supposed to pander to mass tastes here. Deliberately making art that normal people hate doesn’t make you a “real artist” it’s just selfish.
I've always thought one of the virtues of great art was its ability to communicate with the audience. Making something that's hard to understand isn't a selling point.
The problem is that post-modernist art commands large donor funding bases and a disproportionate share of public funding, resulting in an unending stream of widely hated public installations and buildings that the masses want gone and the elites designate historic to prevent that from happening.
If the share of people who genuinely enjoy post-modernist works is in the low double digits then such works should be allocated basically no public funding or space.
Instead they’re basically all new public art installations outside a couple cities with more traditionalist establishments.
It's a free country, and private donors can spend their money on whatever they want...but if it's my tax dollars getting spent in SF to pad the government arts budget? Or allocating part of the commons, like in a community park? Then, yeah, I don't want another creepy alien-looking thing that like six people will appreciate regularly, and three of them are homeless people sleeping on it. A long-term pattern of such turns me against funding arts and beautification at all, because it actively does the opposite of what it says on the tin. Hell, as much as I'd love me some classic statues, we can't even get a handle on gang-sign graffiti and regular defacing of murals in my neighborhood. Maybe start there instead of building another water fountain composed entirely of right angled square pipes?
If artists acted like how you want them to, they would never experiment and we would never have moved beyond cave paintings. What you're prescribing is a world where all art is comfort food for people who don't want to be challenged.
There’s nothing wrong with experimenting or taking a risk. What’s selfish and bad is deliberately making art that normal people hate to signal your membership in a fake elite group of people who pretend to like things that are bad.
The architecture profession’s deliberate embrace of bad styles to diss the public is directly responsible for the raft of historic preservation laws that have contributed to the shortage of housing and other useful buildings. Dissing the public in other arts has also lowered the public’s opinion of the arts and damaged the ability of the arts to obtain funding.
Artists should cater to the public, not a self-contained subculture that opposes the public.
I'm sorry, but if we're comparing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with challenging art, we've lost the plot of living in a free society. Jackson Pollock isn't trying to cause a pogrom.
So I was obviously using an extreme example to illustrate that some things are not good. But come on, you’re the one who said it’s “grotesque” to say that it’s possible for bad art to exist!
I agree on your first paragraph, but I always roll my eyes at the second one. No one really believes “no one really believes” sentiments! I once saw a “no one really prefers dark chocolate” one, like people are spending 5x as much money to buy and eat a chocolate bar that they don’t like just to impress people. Trust me, there is always someone who really likes it!
Let me rephrase: the percentage of people who prefer it hovers in the low double digits, yet basically all public art funding is disbursed to projects that cater to that tiny fraction of the public in most places.
I am very grateful that Philly’s Mural Arts program is run by traditionalists because every mural I see is broadly understandable by the average citizen.
Montezuma's Revenge 100% dark chocolate is the only bar I'll eat anymore. Everything else is too sweet. I like my chocolate like I like my coffee: black, bitter, and preferably fair trade. Both are wonderful for waking you up inside!
But of course I totally understand that it's a niche product most people won't like, the whole point is that it's really bitter! That's the beauty of free markets, I can go out of my way and have peculiar things delivered to me at great expense. Meanwhile the mass public can keep their disgusting Hershey's or whatever. Everybody wins, nobody's chocolate tastes are imposed on others. (I guess the analogy doesn't really stretch, unless we include government rations including chocolate bars.)
For some reason I have a particular hatred of the rabbit art guy. It's obviously pandering to mass tastes, but the artist and the buyers involved act like it's snobbish high art that normal people wouldn't understand because that's the only way to justify spending $10K on a painting.
Oh man I saw this guy's art in passing this weekend at the NYC Art Expo! I actually told my bunny-loving wife "if we had money I'd buy that for you because it's rabbits." We had no idea they were $10k.
i see this a lot in wine reviews and podcasts. there is a "we must not even mention duckhorn and mondavi and caymus" type attitude. thats fine because sometimes those wines are a bit underwhelming for price point, but they are widely sold "splurge" wines that are way more relevant than whatever random vineyard some wine expert visited in burgundy that doesn't even export! spend almost two hours listening to podcast on burgundy and pinout noir and went to wine store the next day and literally none of the wines they. mentioned were available or less that 150 bucks.
@cp6 You’re assuming that mass tastes are fixed and unchanging, but that is not true so any assumption of “good and right” should be timestamped. In 20 years “good and right” might be deemed ugly.
I don’t see anything in my argument that requires that assumption. What is good and right is following an ethic of public service and aiming to please the public, even if you don’t always succeed or your work eventually becomes dated.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of artists and architects who deliberately create things they know the public will hate in order to signal their membership in a self-referential, self-absorbed group that has deluded themselves into thinking that their rejection of the public taste and unwillingness to serve the public makes them superior to the public. Their beliefs are wrong and they are being selfish and bad, and their claim to be “real artists” should be mocked, but what they are doing is about social status, not art.
I saw one of his pieces a year or so ago, at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, NY. Highly recommend. And of course, his work is pretty transitory as far as public art works go, if it doesn't appeal to you, just wait 10 or 20 years, and it'll be gone.
I recently also saw one of Thomas Dambo's installations, and to just enjoy sculptures in a nature park with a large crowd of people all very happy to view something idiosyncratic a guy (and his team) made was really pleasant. I don't feel the need to read extensive criticism of the work.
I'm fine with more statues if they are deployed for the purpose of commemorating some notable person and their contribution to the community / town / state.
But if the statues are just another front in the culture war to challenge and upend the middlebrow views of the hoi polloi then count me out.
If you don’t say “the” it sounds like you’re talking about a Hispanic dude. “We shouldn’t pander to the middlebrow views of Hoi Polloi.” Who? “Oh I work with him in the office. He has terrible taste. Went to Woodstock ‘99 just to see Limp Bizkit”
I think all statues are intrinsically political to an extent, and you're not going to talk people out of that.
But that's why private individuals and organizations should do it, not just public funds!
Depending on you local circumstances, you can also aim it broadly and target less well known figures of local importance. A few years back, cities we're doing public art drives where local institutions or business would sponsor a sculpture, everyone would get the same white thing (typically a symbol of the town) and then everyone would decorate their own thing they way they wanted. We could just do this thing but with local people. Probably cost more to get a likeness but certainly we've got better manufacturing technology now, no?
It will definitely become a front in the culture war . Some right wing jurisdiction will put up a statue of a segregationist and then some lefty jurisdiction will put up a statue of someone from the weather underground and we will be off to the races .
But it's an inherently local decision, no? The local government can decide what statues to put up, whether that's Bubba the Head Busting Jim Crow Era Sheriff or Gwynne the Genderfluid Community Organizer.
Matt Damon has been trying to put up a statue of Robin Williams in the iconic bench-in-the-public-garden scene from Good Will Hunting. The idea being that struggling young men could get guidance from Robin Williams' character much like Will did. The City of Boston has refused, saying that the bench already commemorates someone else. This story pops up every couple of years.
I wonder where MY sits in this high stakes debate.
Robin Williams has become something of a patron saint to certain internet subcultures since his death, just for generally being a pleasant guy who brought joy to a lot of people. It might appeal to more young folk than you would think.
Not trying to be a jerk but can you imagine a scenario where some struggling young man looks up and finds himself under a Robin Williams statue, knows who Robin Williams is, has watched Goodwill Hunting, and then suddenly feels better? If the argument that people who are struggling yet already like Williams will seek this statue out to feel better, I find that equally implausible and also low marginal value. Nonetheless I am in favor of building the statue -- for many reasons -- these just seem like weak arguments.
Perhaps we should just encourage rich people to put more of their money into statues, libraries, museums, and playgrounds instead of ballot initiatives and other quixotic campaigns.
I'm personally not a statue guy, but I love a good mural. More murals please!
(Especially the ones where you write the city's name in block letters and fill each letter with a different image that represents the city. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
The City of LA made one of my favorite bands paint over their huge downtown LA mural with white paint because there was a local preservation code that applied to this ugly old apartment building. An abundance of murals would be preferable, Kobe or otherwise!
Or just periodically change the mural for the sake of changing it. There's a building near my office that for at least a decade has had one wall continually painted with a mural, but they have different artists paint an entirely new image on it every year or so.
I posted it above, but a lot of the Trolls by Thomas Dambu are usually fun places to visit. The troll of Fremont (unrelated to the other trolls) was also a pretty fun thing to take the kids to when they had preschool nearby.
I also maintain that "abundance" should include funding and staffing parks. Ideally, this should be extended to stuff like this, as well.
I'm lucky to live somewhere that has both a program to bring in muralists from all over the globe[1] as well as some really strong local artists - and yeah, we have a couple of the postcard-style murals. They're all great; no notes. Cincinnati also had a really strong mural game when I visited. The building-sized Little Nemo in Slumberland warmed by comic-loving heart.
Oakland is absolutely resplendent with gorgeous murals. It makes walking around downtown so lovely and pleasant, especially on a sunny day. I love that I can hardly go a block without seeing some cool art. I absolutely hate the aesthetic of blank concrete walls, steel beams and huge windows without any color or visual interest.
In general, I’m ok with the idea that there should be more statues to historical figures.
But no way in hell am I for putting up statues if it has to come with re erecting monuments to Confederate generals and leaders. To make the unbelievably obvious point, it’s not just their main contribution to history is in rebellion to the US government, the cause they were fighting for was one on behalf of the biggest moral stain in the history of the United States. And the fact we let the “Dunning school” narrative about this war have way too much power and the fact the South has continually punched above their weight politically for all our history shouldn’t distract us from this reality.
I’m sorry, this is like saying “you know ‘MeToo’ went too far in a few cases like with Aziz Ansari…therefore we need to free Harvey Weinstein and put Matt Lauer back on the air and say all is forgiven”.
So yeah, count me 100% out of statue building if it means honoring proponents of slavery and White Nationalism. Especially now given how many White Nationalits clearly have positions of power in the administration right now.
I was working at Texas A&M university during the peak pandemic, when there was a controversy about the central statue of Sul Ross, the governor of Texas in the 1890s, who bailed out the institution when it had a financial crisis. He had been a confederate general, and people were rightly concerned about that. But it’s clear that the statue was about him in his capacity as a governor who did something important for the university. One of the few anti-woke decisions made by the university administration that I agreed with was resolving this by putting up an additional statue of Matthew Gaines, the legislator who grew up enslaved, who was instrumental in finalizing the legislation that created the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.
(The regents decided that the president in 2020 had been insufficiently respectful of Ross during the process despite saving his statue, and fired him mid-pandemic, and the university has now been through three more presidents, each getting fired in more anti-woke eruptions than the last.)
I went to College of William & Mary for my undergraduate degree in the early 2000s. Bring up because I sort of feel like the particular situation my school was in (at least at the time period) probably has a lot of parallels to where Texas A&M found itself circa 2020. Virginia was a prominent red state (former capitol of the Confederacy and home of a ton of politicians and DC based reporters meaning to this day it gets outsized attention in the Press) trending blue due to growth of it's biggest cities (specifically VA suburbs). William & Mary itself is a public school located in a particularly socially conservative part of America (Williamsburg itself not as much, but surrounding areas? Big time). Finally, the school itself had a history of being a more conservative institution educating the sort of conservative elites of the South (famously a whole lot of "Founding Fathers"), but who's student body had clearly been changing in the previous 10-20 years with way more kids from more "blue" DC suburbs and kids like me from the Northeast (canary in the coal mine maybe is Jon Stewart, more on him in a bit).
Point being, a perfect recipe for some political flashpoints especially in the post 9/11 political environment that existed at the time. Add in the student body was clearly more pro gay marriage than the local socially conservative populace an especially ripe situation for disagreement. As alluded to above, 2001-2006 was clearly The Daily Show heyday and it was a definite point of pride that Jon Stewart was an alumn...at least to the students. Lets say his visits and commencement address in 2022 ruffled some feathers. But a big flashpoint probably more akin to the Texas A&M statue situation was the presence of a cross located at Wren Chapel, one of the more famous parts of the campus; along with the Wren building a national historic site actually deserving of the designation. The college President had the cross taken down in 2006 citing the fact the college is a public institution. Yeah, didn't go well. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23133443. And yeah, an incident that definitely made me less inclined to want to give money to my alma mater in the future when I actually maybe had extra money to give.
Point being, I feel like we underrate how many political "flashpoints" at colleges is downstream from the fact that regents and local area are just really out of step with the new politics of a school and dig in their heels and stir up hornet's nests out of stubbornness. Really wonder how much of the anti-college turn we've seen on the right is downstream of the number of colleges where the politics of the campus, even if it's not particularly left wing, starts really diverging from the politics that used to exist just 10-20-30 years prior.
I’ve only read the headline and I wholeheartedly agree. I want those giant statues they have in fantasy / science fiction series like the Lord of the Rings prequel or Peripheral. Some tech billionaire proposed a huge Prometheus in San Francisco. Bring it on! That would be so cool!
Fun fact, most of the giant statues we have in the world are of Buddha. The exception on the African continent is a great one in Senegal, the African Renaissance monument, highly recommend.
For anyone curious, it’s technically just under half of the tallest statues are Buddha, but most of them depict religious or political figures in India and Southeast Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_statues
The Great Pyramid at Giza consumed about 5% of Egyptian GDP for about 20 years. What could we build with that kind of money (27 trillion) that would last thousands of years?
With that kind of budget you could build a much larger pyramid on the moon that would last billions of years.
I don't hate the idea of making the space program the destination for prestige projects. In particular I think that looking for extraterrestrial life would be good prestige spend.
More, bigger, better telescopes and probes to places like Mars, Europa, and Titan.
If we had the same percentage of GDP to play with (2%) the budget would be $600 billion. The proposed 2km 680 story tower in Saudi Arabia would only cost $5 billion.
There is a grocery store on the 44th floor of the John Hancock Building in Chicago. One would expect the same in a residential building - services every 50 stories or some such.
I’ll probably be accused of sophistry here but if we should leave up Washington and Jefferson statues even though they owned slaves because that’s not *why* they have the statues, doesn’t the same logic apply to Cesar Chavez? Nobody built statues of him *because* he was an ephebophilic sexual predator; he was an influential and inspirational labor leader who happened to be flawed in a way that was sadly pretty common for powerful men of his era (the late 20th and 21st centuries). Leave ‘em up!
Yeah, I think it would ring a little differently if Chavez had been committing his abuse completely over on the side, whether or not that's fair. Instead, it seems as though that abuse was part and parcel of his labor movement, and that's awful hard to disentangle, should we want to try (I have no dog in that fight).
I think some of the problem with Chavez is that it is less clear what exactly we are celebrating. If the same allegations came out against MLK I'd completely agree (not just some affairs). The problem with Chavez is that he has largely come to be seen as a divisive or lefty figure and thus there is no real shared understanding of what else his statute would represent.
That doesn't mean he didn't do anything good just that we didn't absorb such a narrative enough for a statute of him to clearly represent an achievement the way MLK represents the success of the civil rights movement or Jefferson the Declaration and Washington the man who wouldn't be king. Maybe if history had been taught differently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but without an agreed mythology as to what the statute represents we tend to fall back to it being a general endorsement of the individual.
Funny enough, Chavez was a hawk on illegal immigration because it depressed wages for his workers while Ronald Reagan was like... not pro-illegal immigration exactly, but very happy to look the other way.
I actually think that’s more intellectually coherent than the current liberal/progressive stance of lip service support for unions + unlimited flows of unregistered workers. He did say some terrible things about immigrants so not defending him on that.
As I understand it, Chavez wasn't especially popular in many Hispanic communities outside of California even while he was alive. Denver only named a park after him in 2004 and just put an official statute of him up in 2015. (The Cesar Chavez Park will reportedly be renamed and the statue, which was basically immediately defaced, will be removed.) We have a couple dozen other parks, statues, streets, etc. named for other Hispanic civil rights activists/leaders, whom I believe are all local figures, like Paco Sanchez Park and the Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales Library.
One time I was giving an Uber ride to some Australians in Portland, and we turned on to Cesar Chavez Blvd (soon to be 39th again) and they asked who Cesar Chavez was. I told them he was a labor leader in California for agriculture workers and some people kind of considered him the Mexican MLK. Thet were quiet for a minute and then we're like "so Mexicans had different water fountains in California?" And I'm like "you know the more you ask about this guy, the more I realize I don't know much about him."
Los Angeles has a weird feature where the east west streets from downtown on south are mostly numbered, except for the arterials, which all have a name instead of a number, so lots of people don’t even realize there is a numbered grid! But it means that the name Martin Luther King replaced Santa Barbara rather than 40th, and Obama replaced Rodeo rather than 37th (and that was particularly good, because this is not the famous Rodeo Dr in Beverly Hills, but just a much bigger road that could easily confuse tourists looking at a map).
I have an irrational hatred for numbered streets that get skipped. Park Avenue in Manhattan should be Fourth Avenue. Broadway in downtown Portland should be 7th Ave. Capitol Blvd. in downtown Boise should be 7th St.
Oddly enough, an exception is when 17th St. got renamed here to Benjamin Harrison due to his visit as a pitch to give Idaho statehood to try to help his (ultimately failed) reelection bid, they didn't skip it, and just moved 17th St and the others one number over to the west.
That's a hilarious anecdote. I think it illustrates the degree that all of these celebrations of people are at least a little astro-turfed, but in order to stick their story needs to transcend their natural constituency, at least a little.
It would be the true apotheosis exclamation point to her mayoralty if a statue was proposed for some park near city hall and construction was delayed for years because someone objected to the shadows the statue would cast at some neighboring flowers and filed a CEQA lawsuit in response in order to study the environmental impact on said flowers.
I actually think it's something a bit different; NIMBY is at its heart the perfect encapsulation of small "c" conservatism in practice if not in theory. Emphasis on the small "c" in conservatism and emphasis on in practice.
It's almost literally standing athwart of bulldozers and yelling stop!
Nah, but I listened to her challenger on PSA this AM. Sounds like a reasonable candidate.
I wonder how true her story about the last-minute entry is, tho. It’s believable, but it could also have been a strategic move to seize attention. Looks like there are a bunch of candidates all running to Bass’s housing left, so it’s a risky move to further split the YIMBY vote against Bass.
Hopefully the race consolidates so that a clear YIMBY challenger can survive the primary and unseat Bass. She’s just been so horrible, she’s holding back progress and embarrassing the entire state.
In early February 2026, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appeared to be heading toward a smooth reelection. With just days left before the filing deadline, no serious challenger had emerged: former schools superintendent Austin Beutner had effectively paused his campaign after the sudden death of his daughter, while other potential candidates hesitated or declined to run. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the city’s condition—rising housing costs, fiscal strain, infrastructure problems, and lingering fallout from the Palisades fire—Bass had consolidated support across key constituencies, leaving the impression that the race might pass without meaningful opposition.
That sense of stability masked deep frustration within the city’s political class. Many civic leaders and operatives believed Los Angeles was adrift, citing concerns about governance, budgeting, and the pace of recovery from recent crises. Still, no one had successfully translated that dissatisfaction into a viable campaign. Figures like real estate developer Rick Caruso and County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath quietly explored bids, while others waited on the sidelines, uncertain whether there was a clear path to victory against an incumbent who had carefully built alliances across labor, business, and political institutions.
The race began to shift dramatically midweek after a damaging news report alleged that Bass had downplayed failures in the city’s fire response. The story intensified scrutiny of her leadership and triggered a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity. Horvath and her allies revisited the possibility of entering the race, even encouraging Caruso to reconsider. At the same time, Beutner officially withdrew, removing the most credible moderate alternative. Caruso briefly weighed a last-minute bid but ultimately decided against it, citing personal and political considerations. With the deadline approaching and no major challenger stepping forward, the field seemed unexpectedly open.
Into that vacuum stepped City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive previously aligned with Bass. Initially not planning to run, Raman grew increasingly frustrated with what she viewed as weak leadership and risky fiscal decisions, particularly around homelessness policy and major city expenditures. As it became clear that no other strong challenger would emerge, advisers and allies encouraged her to consider a campaign. Over the course of a single day, the idea crystallized: by Friday night, after discussions with her husband and political contacts, she decided to enter the race.
On Saturday morning, just hours before the filing deadline, Raman formally declared her candidacy, blindsiding Bass and much of the political establishment. Her entry instantly transformed the contest from a likely non-event into a competitive and uncertain race, defined by ideological tensions within the city’s Democratic coalition and broader dissatisfaction with the status quo. What had seemed like a quiet path to reelection for Bass instead became a volatile political battle shaped by a handful of rapid decisions, personal circumstances, and last-minute calculations among a small circle of influential actors.
A statue I like isn’t dedicated to an individual but to an event and not a heroic one at that. In Orlando’s main public park there’s a huge statue to the men who died on Bataan and Corregidor.
I like it because A—it’s focused on something not a lot of people know about and B—isn’t a tribute to the great man theory of history. We don’t really need more people to remember Washington in a city center. I don’t think we’re at risk of forgetting.
There used to be a statue of the confederate soldier nearby which has been disappeared. Which I feel like makes sense at like a battleground park like Gettysburg but not in a city center.
When athletes do something great, there is often a call to "build the statue" but rarely are the statues ever actually built. I wonder if costs have become an issue.
Sports statues should have been included in this take. Two incredible statues that Boston should have: Malcom Butler's interception, the iconic image of him jumping the ball and Lockette flying past him. David Ortiz 's grand slam in the ALCS, the security guard raised his hands up just as the outfielder went tumbling legs up into the bullpen.
I visited Cincinnati last summer, and the city has a number of sports statues, but they have two fields that are actually in the city limits and near each other, so maybe it is the critical mass that gives impetus to the statues.
I'm not talking about Ortiz though. I'm talking about the arms up and the legs up image. It's not the most iconic moment in boston sports, I think it happened in game 2 or 3. But it's such a cool image, just make a statue of it.
I think this is another case of contemporary statues being bad. I’m not informed, but my guess is that all the serious art schools are doing avant-garde stuff so actual representation is just done by hacks now.
Chicago has a Michael Jordan statue right outside the United center, but the only reason people go to that area is to go to the UC. They should instead replace the the bronze figure on top of the Chicago board of trade building with a Michael Jordan statue
He's the guy from the memes -- crying, saying "and I took that personally," saying "fuck them kids", telling you to stop it and get some help. Like an '80s or '90s version of a streamer. No?
I went to a few Hawks games back when the Dominique Wilkins statue was new and people seemed to like it a lot. Also I used to work by the Charging Bull, and I’ve been to the Rocky statue in Philly, and both get a lot of tourists but the line for Rocky was crazy. We should build more sports statues, real and fictional.
Maybe I’m being too influenced by rage bait content but I get the feeling a lot of sports fans have no interest in what came before especially in the nba.
Like the way people speak of Mikkean, Russel, chamberlain is so dismissive. Apparently everyone on those team was a Plumber. Even David Stern used to talk about the nba as the league of the here and now so to an extent it comes from the top.
I think people are skeptical of the pre-Magic / Bird era NBA.
However, I think they hold up the 80s and 90s era as the pinnacle of the NBA It could be my bubble but the complaining about flopping, load management, 3 point shooting, lack of defense, caring in All Star game, is all up in my feed all the time and in real world conversations, too.
I think there’s a lot of Gen X nostalgia about the NBA in that time.
No complaint about superstars changing the name on the front of the jersey as often as I do laundry? Magic, Bird, and Jordan* stuck with their team, their franchise through thick and thin for their entire careers, and by jove that's how we liked it!
Speak for yourself. Here in LA we have three different Kobe statues, a Magic, a Shaq, a Kareem, a Gretzky, a De La Hoya, and even one for legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn.
There's a statue of the "Immaculate Reception" in the Pittsburgh airport. It's made to look real and is not made of marble, but it is quite literally a statue of Franco Harris catching the ball. I like it. And it's one of the standout features of the airport, along with the T-Rex skeleton and a similar full-color lifelike George Washington.
I'd imagine that's a combination of how long public approval of art projects take combined with the Seinfeld issue of rooting for the uniform, not the specific players -- by the time you get through the planning, design, etc., process, the specific player may very well have moved to another team or now be viewed as a greedy jerk because of a contract dispute, etc.
They should include inspiring quotes too, such as, "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."
The most cromulent comment in this thread.
Did you know he was actually a bloodthirsty pirate?
I reject that and other anti-American woke nonsense, including the rumor that he didn't tame the wild buffalo, he merely shot it.
The dead white male bashing from PC thugs like me is what stops women from finding good husbands.
It never stops hurting being called a greasy thug.
Agree, we should have more statues with sayings including perfectly cromulant words.
My new dream is now paying for a Jebediah Springfield statue in my town (which is not a springfield)
If one goes to the Library of Congress Jefferson building and looks in a general upward direction basically anywhere in the building, they will realize that something major has been lost when it comes to public art. Spending money on that type of work would feel ridiculously extravagant to the average tax payer today, even though we already spend ridiculous sums on less appealing public spaces.
We should absolutely have all the brutalist advocates hanged, I agree, but as a general rule for public buildings globally, the more ornamentation, the less the people making it earned and the worse their lives were.
I do have some thoughts on mass production of patterned brick and cement tiles with relief molding, I think it'd go a long way towards making it inexpensive to build pleasant-looking housing and commercial spaces, but statuary and complex stonework are a whole different ballgame.
Brutalism can be done well and in an inspiring way, but it is rare. Boston City Hall is made fun of all the time but the interior is genuinely awe inspiring. It feels like it could have been built millennia ago or millennia in the future.
I’ve been in a dozen-odd brutalist buildings and never found the interiors awe-inspiring, but even if true... most of the citizenry will spend no or little time inside them. We owe the masses something that doesn’t look terrible from the outside, by their lights. Not those of the NYT’s architecture critic.
Death to brutalism. Neoclassical forever!
Au contraire. Death to brutalism (ugly) and neoclassical (tacky when new); upwards with nice, post-2000 blue-ish glass cubes with a pleasant pedestrian interface with the public realm. Architects today are doing nice things, unlike in the 60s and 70s.
Give me Corinthian columns, or give me death!
Two Corinthians columns, even. The biggest, most beautiful columns.
The exterior of Boston City Hall is amazing too! Bad brutalist buildings are bad because they're boring, but there's nothing boring about that one.
The plaza it’s in is pretty bad though. It’s one of those classic windswept open spaces with nothing to do but skateboard, so they put up signs saying “no skateboarding” and thus no one uses it.
It sucks.
It’s kind of hilarious, because around Faneuil Hall it’s always teeming with people (including lots of tourists) and street performers, and then you cross the street to the City Hall and surrounding plaza, and it looks everyone has recently fled a zombie attack.
They've done good work revitalizing that plaza in the last few years! It's much more gardened, there's a genuinely terrific and original playground that I love taking my kids to (and which is home to the now-nationally-famous "cop slide"), and the parts that remain bare brick host occasional craft fairs and beer gardens and the like. They could do more, but it's night and day from when I first moved to Boston.
That’s good news! I haven’t been there since 2012.
Thanks -- I never saw images of the interior before. Agreed it looks amazing.
I endlessly enjoy the topic of "what modern buildings actually look good?" My favorite modern building is the Vertical Forest in Milan. I love a good 'belle epoque' building as much as the next person, but trying to recreate them in our era almost always look tacky and jarring. Case and point, that abortion of a Whitehouse Ballroom.
Most new office buildings actually look good. One Vanderbilt, Salesforce, all of Hudson yards, new JPM, everything in the City of London post-2000, Tour Triangle, Azabudai Hills, etc. are all great.
TBF, the White House Ballroom does not exist yet, and with luck may never be built as envisioned or at all.
I remember seeing so many renderings of that Bosco Verticale going around when the building was designed, and I was skeptical that the real thing could be as good. But in 2019 I was on a trip to Italy and had one day in Milan, so I prioritized seeing this building over the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele or La Scala or the Last Supper, and it was actually great!
I think most modern buildings that are trying to be attractive succeed well enough unless the budget constraints are crippling.
Brutalism was specifically trying to produce unattractive works, and it succeeded.
Unironically brutalism should be safe, legal, and rare.
There are many worse designs than brutalism and I for one love it, the good ones anyways.
It is not “cringe” to pander to mass tastes, it is simply good and right.
America is a democracy and you are supposed to pander to mass tastes here. Deliberately making art that normal people hate doesn’t make you a “real artist” it’s just selfish.
I've always thought one of the virtues of great art was its ability to communicate with the audience. Making something that's hard to understand isn't a selling point.
There isn't just one single audience though. There are multiple audiences. Some art isn't for everyone, but for a specific audience.
The problem is that post-modernist art commands large donor funding bases and a disproportionate share of public funding, resulting in an unending stream of widely hated public installations and buildings that the masses want gone and the elites designate historic to prevent that from happening.
If the share of people who genuinely enjoy post-modernist works is in the low double digits then such works should be allocated basically no public funding or space.
Instead they’re basically all new public art installations outside a couple cities with more traditionalist establishments.
It's a free country, and private donors can spend their money on whatever they want...but if it's my tax dollars getting spent in SF to pad the government arts budget? Or allocating part of the commons, like in a community park? Then, yeah, I don't want another creepy alien-looking thing that like six people will appreciate regularly, and three of them are homeless people sleeping on it. A long-term pattern of such turns me against funding arts and beautification at all, because it actively does the opposite of what it says on the tin. Hell, as much as I'd love me some classic statues, we can't even get a handle on gang-sign graffiti and regular defacing of murals in my neighborhood. Maybe start there instead of building another water fountain composed entirely of right angled square pipes?
Re contemporary sculpture, this tweet (which maybe was deleted on the actual site) is the most important cultural commentary of the last decade: https://ifunny.co/picture/as-a-teacher-of-poetry-what-i-can-tell-you-S90xfS7w8
Buildings and art should be ugly but generate lots of column inches architecture magazines. That is the important measure of things.
I adored this column and agree with cp6’s comment. The 20th century abstraction of representative arts has been a disaster.
Democracy means you get to vote for your leaders; it doesn’t mean you can’t make the art that you want to make even if other people don’t like it.
Just because you are legally allowed to do something does not mean it is good.
That's a grotesque sentiment.
How so? There are lots and lots of things that are legal and also generally viewed as bad.
If artists acted like how you want them to, they would never experiment and we would never have moved beyond cave paintings. What you're prescribing is a world where all art is comfort food for people who don't want to be challenged.
There’s nothing wrong with experimenting or taking a risk. What’s selfish and bad is deliberately making art that normal people hate to signal your membership in a fake elite group of people who pretend to like things that are bad.
The architecture profession’s deliberate embrace of bad styles to diss the public is directly responsible for the raft of historic preservation laws that have contributed to the shortage of housing and other useful buildings. Dissing the public in other arts has also lowered the public’s opinion of the arts and damaged the ability of the arts to obtain funding.
Artists should cater to the public, not a self-contained subculture that opposes the public.
Michelangelo and Vermeer’s challenges are far more beautiful than any challenges produced during modernity.
? Which is, cp6’s? It seems straightforward to me—you can legally write a pamphlet of anti-Semitic propaganda, but we would agree that isn’t good.
I'm sorry, but if we're comparing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with challenging art, we've lost the plot of living in a free society. Jackson Pollock isn't trying to cause a pogrom.
So I was obviously using an extreme example to illustrate that some things are not good. But come on, you’re the one who said it’s “grotesque” to say that it’s possible for bad art to exist!
People can make whatever art they want, but we ought to be choosy when deciding which art should be displayed in publicly owned spaces.
Yes, but it does mean the electorate should be able to cut off the public funding that allows most of this dreck to exist.
No one actually *likes* post-modernist art, people just claim to for clout.
I agree on your first paragraph, but I always roll my eyes at the second one. No one really believes “no one really believes” sentiments! I once saw a “no one really prefers dark chocolate” one, like people are spending 5x as much money to buy and eat a chocolate bar that they don’t like just to impress people. Trust me, there is always someone who really likes it!
"I can't imagine people making different life choices than me."
Let me rephrase: the percentage of people who prefer it hovers in the low double digits, yet basically all public art funding is disbursed to projects that cater to that tiny fraction of the public in most places.
I am very grateful that Philly’s Mural Arts program is run by traditionalists because every mural I see is broadly understandable by the average citizen.
Montezuma's Revenge 100% dark chocolate is the only bar I'll eat anymore. Everything else is too sweet. I like my chocolate like I like my coffee: black, bitter, and preferably fair trade. Both are wonderful for waking you up inside!
But of course I totally understand that it's a niche product most people won't like, the whole point is that it's really bitter! That's the beauty of free markets, I can go out of my way and have peculiar things delivered to me at great expense. Meanwhile the mass public can keep their disgusting Hershey's or whatever. Everybody wins, nobody's chocolate tastes are imposed on others. (I guess the analogy doesn't really stretch, unless we include government rations including chocolate bars.)
"It's Po-Mo!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0DwRAVJZ4A
For some reason I have a particular hatred of the rabbit art guy. It's obviously pandering to mass tastes, but the artist and the buyers involved act like it's snobbish high art that normal people wouldn't understand because that's the only way to justify spending $10K on a painting.
https://www.huntslonem.com/paintings/bunnies-wip
Oh man I saw this guy's art in passing this weekend at the NYC Art Expo! I actually told my bunny-loving wife "if we had money I'd buy that for you because it's rabbits." We had no idea they were $10k.
i see this a lot in wine reviews and podcasts. there is a "we must not even mention duckhorn and mondavi and caymus" type attitude. thats fine because sometimes those wines are a bit underwhelming for price point, but they are widely sold "splurge" wines that are way more relevant than whatever random vineyard some wine expert visited in burgundy that doesn't even export! spend almost two hours listening to podcast on burgundy and pinout noir and went to wine store the next day and literally none of the wines they. mentioned were available or less that 150 bucks.
@cp6 You’re assuming that mass tastes are fixed and unchanging, but that is not true so any assumption of “good and right” should be timestamped. In 20 years “good and right” might be deemed ugly.
I don’t see anything in my argument that requires that assumption. What is good and right is following an ethic of public service and aiming to please the public, even if you don’t always succeed or your work eventually becomes dated.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of artists and architects who deliberately create things they know the public will hate in order to signal their membership in a self-referential, self-absorbed group that has deluded themselves into thinking that their rejection of the public taste and unwillingness to serve the public makes them superior to the public. Their beliefs are wrong and they are being selfish and bad, and their claim to be “real artists” should be mocked, but what they are doing is about social status, not art.
Anyone remember the stick guy? https://share.google/Kzo9yeMVQ6ZxmsmFc
Come on, those are dope!
It's true, looking at the pictures I was like oh I want to go inside all of those
I saw one of his pieces a year or so ago, at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, NY. Highly recommend. And of course, his work is pretty transitory as far as public art works go, if it doesn't appeal to you, just wait 10 or 20 years, and it'll be gone.
I recently also saw one of Thomas Dambo's installations, and to just enjoy sculptures in a nature park with a large crowd of people all very happy to view something idiosyncratic a guy (and his team) made was really pleasant. I don't feel the need to read extensive criticism of the work.
I'm fine with more statues if they are deployed for the purpose of commemorating some notable person and their contribution to the community / town / state.
But if the statues are just another front in the culture war to challenge and upend the middlebrow views of the hoi polloi then count me out.
"Hoi polloi," no "the;" or "the polloi" :)
In your other comment, you misspelled "challenge" as "chalenge". In addition, "progressive" shouldn't be capitalized in that comment either. :)
That's the kind of commentary I need more of. :)
I see what you mean as a matter of translation, but per Merriam Webster:
“In Greek, hoi polloi means simply "the many". (Even though hoi itself means "the", in English we almost always say "the hoi polloi".)”
So I wonder if this is a bit like insisting that decimate means to reduce by 10%. Not in 2026 American English it doesn’t!
If you don’t say “the” it sounds like you’re talking about a Hispanic dude. “We shouldn’t pander to the middlebrow views of Hoi Polloi.” Who? “Oh I work with him in the office. He has terrible taste. Went to Woodstock ‘99 just to see Limp Bizkit”
And we eat shrimp scampi.
I think all statues are intrinsically political to an extent, and you're not going to talk people out of that.
But that's why private individuals and organizations should do it, not just public funds!
Depending on you local circumstances, you can also aim it broadly and target less well known figures of local importance. A few years back, cities we're doing public art drives where local institutions or business would sponsor a sculpture, everyone would get the same white thing (typically a symbol of the town) and then everyone would decorate their own thing they way they wanted. We could just do this thing but with local people. Probably cost more to get a likeness but certainly we've got better manufacturing technology now, no?
Intent obviously matters a lot in all these disputes.
And if they were to "chalenge and upend" Progressive views? :)
Same. I don't want some retrograde statue being placed at the corner of Haight and Ashbury commemorating some anti-abortion figure.
Word has it they've commissioned a statue of Ron DeSantis with angel wings right in front of your house.
It will match the one my neighbors have.
It will definitely become a front in the culture war . Some right wing jurisdiction will put up a statue of a segregationist and then some lefty jurisdiction will put up a statue of someone from the weather underground and we will be off to the races .
But it's an inherently local decision, no? The local government can decide what statues to put up, whether that's Bubba the Head Busting Jim Crow Era Sheriff or Gwynne the Genderfluid Community Organizer.
Matt Damon has been trying to put up a statue of Robin Williams in the iconic bench-in-the-public-garden scene from Good Will Hunting. The idea being that struggling young men could get guidance from Robin Williams' character much like Will did. The City of Boston has refused, saying that the bench already commemorates someone else. This story pops up every couple of years.
I wonder where MY sits in this high stakes debate.
I feel like there's enough room in Boston for two benches ...
"The idea being that struggling young men could get guidance from Robin Williams' character much like Will did."
What young men even know about Good Will Hunting? AARP members are the only people who know Good Will Hunting!
We even already have a "sit next to the guy" bench statue of Red Auerbach. I bet he'd hear people out.
Personally I doubt many struggling young men would benefit from a Robin statue but nonetheless we should build it
Robin Williams has become something of a patron saint to certain internet subcultures since his death, just for generally being a pleasant guy who brought joy to a lot of people. It might appeal to more young folk than you would think.
Not trying to be a jerk but can you imagine a scenario where some struggling young man looks up and finds himself under a Robin Williams statue, knows who Robin Williams is, has watched Goodwill Hunting, and then suddenly feels better? If the argument that people who are struggling yet already like Williams will seek this statue out to feel better, I find that equally implausible and also low marginal value. Nonetheless I am in favor of building the statue -- for many reasons -- these just seem like weak arguments.
Robin Williams does have an automobile tunnel named after him.
Perhaps we should just encourage rich people to put more of their money into statues, libraries, museums, and playgrounds instead of ballot initiatives and other quixotic campaigns.
Breaking out the superlike™️ for this—yes, please!
I'm personally not a statue guy, but I love a good mural. More murals please!
(Especially the ones where you write the city's name in block letters and fill each letter with a different image that represents the city. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Be careful what you wish for. You can’t go more than a few blocks in LA without seeing a Kobe mural.
The City of LA made one of my favorite bands paint over their huge downtown LA mural with white paint because there was a local preservation code that applied to this ugly old apartment building. An abundance of murals would be preferable, Kobe or otherwise!
100% agree. And they are easier to change when something damning is revealed about the person depicted.
Or just periodically change the mural for the sake of changing it. There's a building near my office that for at least a decade has had one wall continually painted with a mural, but they have different artists paint an entirely new image on it every year or so.
As an aside, I've wondered for years what the technical term for that style of art (the filled-in letters, I mean) is.
In general, art installations are just fun to have, period. Knuth designed some art based on Knight's Tours that he describes here: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/knights.html
I posted it above, but a lot of the Trolls by Thomas Dambu are usually fun places to visit. The troll of Fremont (unrelated to the other trolls) was also a pretty fun thing to take the kids to when they had preschool nearby.
I also maintain that "abundance" should include funding and staffing parks. Ideally, this should be extended to stuff like this, as well.
I'm lucky to live somewhere that has both a program to bring in muralists from all over the globe[1] as well as some really strong local artists - and yeah, we have a couple of the postcard-style murals. They're all great; no notes. Cincinnati also had a really strong mural game when I visited. The building-sized Little Nemo in Slumberland warmed by comic-loving heart.
[1] https://www.wall-therapy.com/
Oakland is absolutely resplendent with gorgeous murals. It makes walking around downtown so lovely and pleasant, especially on a sunny day. I love that I can hardly go a block without seeing some cool art. I absolutely hate the aesthetic of blank concrete walls, steel beams and huge windows without any color or visual interest.
The Rocky statue in Philly is great and we need more statues of fictional characters.
The ducklings in Boston Public Garden!
Which one lol
The March sisters, Han Solo, all the reservoir dogs, Jay Gatsby, Huck and Jim, Charlie Brown, the Dude…
I meant which Rocky statue, but if they put a statue of the Dude at the top of the art museum steps I wouldn't complain!
Spongebob
In general, I’m ok with the idea that there should be more statues to historical figures.
But no way in hell am I for putting up statues if it has to come with re erecting monuments to Confederate generals and leaders. To make the unbelievably obvious point, it’s not just their main contribution to history is in rebellion to the US government, the cause they were fighting for was one on behalf of the biggest moral stain in the history of the United States. And the fact we let the “Dunning school” narrative about this war have way too much power and the fact the South has continually punched above their weight politically for all our history shouldn’t distract us from this reality.
I’m sorry, this is like saying “you know ‘MeToo’ went too far in a few cases like with Aziz Ansari…therefore we need to free Harvey Weinstein and put Matt Lauer back on the air and say all is forgiven”.
So yeah, count me 100% out of statue building if it means honoring proponents of slavery and White Nationalism. Especially now given how many White Nationalits clearly have positions of power in the administration right now.
I was working at Texas A&M university during the peak pandemic, when there was a controversy about the central statue of Sul Ross, the governor of Texas in the 1890s, who bailed out the institution when it had a financial crisis. He had been a confederate general, and people were rightly concerned about that. But it’s clear that the statue was about him in his capacity as a governor who did something important for the university. One of the few anti-woke decisions made by the university administration that I agreed with was resolving this by putting up an additional statue of Matthew Gaines, the legislator who grew up enslaved, who was instrumental in finalizing the legislation that created the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.
(The regents decided that the president in 2020 had been insufficiently respectful of Ross during the process despite saving his statue, and fired him mid-pandemic, and the university has now been through three more presidents, each getting fired in more anti-woke eruptions than the last.)
I went to College of William & Mary for my undergraduate degree in the early 2000s. Bring up because I sort of feel like the particular situation my school was in (at least at the time period) probably has a lot of parallels to where Texas A&M found itself circa 2020. Virginia was a prominent red state (former capitol of the Confederacy and home of a ton of politicians and DC based reporters meaning to this day it gets outsized attention in the Press) trending blue due to growth of it's biggest cities (specifically VA suburbs). William & Mary itself is a public school located in a particularly socially conservative part of America (Williamsburg itself not as much, but surrounding areas? Big time). Finally, the school itself had a history of being a more conservative institution educating the sort of conservative elites of the South (famously a whole lot of "Founding Fathers"), but who's student body had clearly been changing in the previous 10-20 years with way more kids from more "blue" DC suburbs and kids like me from the Northeast (canary in the coal mine maybe is Jon Stewart, more on him in a bit).
Point being, a perfect recipe for some political flashpoints especially in the post 9/11 political environment that existed at the time. Add in the student body was clearly more pro gay marriage than the local socially conservative populace an especially ripe situation for disagreement. As alluded to above, 2001-2006 was clearly The Daily Show heyday and it was a definite point of pride that Jon Stewart was an alumn...at least to the students. Lets say his visits and commencement address in 2022 ruffled some feathers. But a big flashpoint probably more akin to the Texas A&M statue situation was the presence of a cross located at Wren Chapel, one of the more famous parts of the campus; along with the Wren building a national historic site actually deserving of the designation. The college President had the cross taken down in 2006 citing the fact the college is a public institution. Yeah, didn't go well. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23133443. And yeah, an incident that definitely made me less inclined to want to give money to my alma mater in the future when I actually maybe had extra money to give.
Point being, I feel like we underrate how many political "flashpoints" at colleges is downstream from the fact that regents and local area are just really out of step with the new politics of a school and dig in their heels and stir up hornet's nests out of stubbornness. Really wonder how much of the anti-college turn we've seen on the right is downstream of the number of colleges where the politics of the campus, even if it's not particularly left wing, starts really diverging from the politics that used to exist just 10-20-30 years prior.
I’ve only read the headline and I wholeheartedly agree. I want those giant statues they have in fantasy / science fiction series like the Lord of the Rings prequel or Peripheral. Some tech billionaire proposed a huge Prometheus in San Francisco. Bring it on! That would be so cool!
Fun fact, most of the giant statues we have in the world are of Buddha. The exception on the African continent is a great one in Senegal, the African Renaissance monument, highly recommend.
For anyone curious, it’s technically just under half of the tallest statues are Buddha, but most of them depict religious or political figures in India and Southeast Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_statues
It's wild how Asia dominates that list. Only four of the fifty are not in Asia (one each in Russia, Ukraine, Senegal, Mexico).
It helps to have missed out on receiving the "No graven images" commandment.
Wasn't the one in Senegal built by North Korea?
Did not know that! Apparently they’ve built a lot of giant statues. Guess they have the savoir faire!
It's one of their ways to get foreign currency and attempt to get around sanctions.
Practice makes perfect right? Presumably they build Great Leader statues in some abundance...
Or had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan
The Great Pyramid at Giza consumed about 5% of Egyptian GDP for about 20 years. What could we build with that kind of money (27 trillion) that would last thousands of years?
With that kind of budget you could build a much larger pyramid on the moon that would last billions of years.
Space elevator time.
I don't hate the idea of making the space program the destination for prestige projects. In particular I think that looking for extraterrestrial life would be good prestige spend.
More, bigger, better telescopes and probes to places like Mars, Europa, and Titan.
Monarchies love bizarre GDP-consuming pyramids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
If we had the same percentage of GDP to play with (2%) the budget would be $600 billion. The proposed 2km 680 story tower in Saudi Arabia would only cost $5 billion.
Just imagine you’re living on the 617th floor and suddenly you realize you forgot to buy milk on the way home
"Honey, the dog needs to go out again. I'll be back in an hour"
There is a grocery store on the 44th floor of the John Hancock Building in Chicago. One would expect the same in a residential building - services every 50 stories or some such.
fully support.
america needs more gandhi, nelson mandela, norman borlaug statues.
more statues for scientists like jennifer doudna, marie curie, mathematicians etc.
A++
Not enough people know who Borlaug was,, his work saved millions upon millions from starvation, definitely deserves a statue!
And I’m all for more statues of women scientists! Marie Curie, definitely, and happy to see the shout-out to Jennifer Doudna. CRISPR rocks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igMPPzr-7Dw
EDIT: And the very rare time when a YouTube comment is worth reading--look what @jamescraft2976 said!
I’ll probably be accused of sophistry here but if we should leave up Washington and Jefferson statues even though they owned slaves because that’s not *why* they have the statues, doesn’t the same logic apply to Cesar Chavez? Nobody built statues of him *because* he was an ephebophilic sexual predator; he was an influential and inspirational labor leader who happened to be flawed in a way that was sadly pretty common for powerful men of his era (the late 20th and 21st centuries). Leave ‘em up!
I think that fact that his victims are still alive is a big part of it.
1. Still alive and 2. Leaders in the same labor movement
Yeah, I think it would ring a little differently if Chavez had been committing his abuse completely over on the side, whether or not that's fair. Instead, it seems as though that abuse was part and parcel of his labor movement, and that's awful hard to disentangle, should we want to try (I have no dog in that fight).
I think some of the problem with Chavez is that it is less clear what exactly we are celebrating. If the same allegations came out against MLK I'd completely agree (not just some affairs). The problem with Chavez is that he has largely come to be seen as a divisive or lefty figure and thus there is no real shared understanding of what else his statute would represent.
That doesn't mean he didn't do anything good just that we didn't absorb such a narrative enough for a statute of him to clearly represent an achievement the way MLK represents the success of the civil rights movement or Jefferson the Declaration and Washington the man who wouldn't be king. Maybe if history had been taught differently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but without an agreed mythology as to what the statute represents we tend to fall back to it being a general endorsement of the individual.
Funny enough, Chavez was a hawk on illegal immigration because it depressed wages for his workers while Ronald Reagan was like... not pro-illegal immigration exactly, but very happy to look the other way.
I actually think that’s more intellectually coherent than the current liberal/progressive stance of lip service support for unions + unlimited flows of unregistered workers. He did say some terrible things about immigrants so not defending him on that.
It is more coherent. It's also more honest about what a union actually is (a cartel for a certain number of workers).
As I understand it, Chavez wasn't especially popular in many Hispanic communities outside of California even while he was alive. Denver only named a park after him in 2004 and just put an official statute of him up in 2015. (The Cesar Chavez Park will reportedly be renamed and the statue, which was basically immediately defaced, will be removed.) We have a couple dozen other parks, statues, streets, etc. named for other Hispanic civil rights activists/leaders, whom I believe are all local figures, like Paco Sanchez Park and the Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales Library.
One time I was giving an Uber ride to some Australians in Portland, and we turned on to Cesar Chavez Blvd (soon to be 39th again) and they asked who Cesar Chavez was. I told them he was a labor leader in California for agriculture workers and some people kind of considered him the Mexican MLK. Thet were quiet for a minute and then we're like "so Mexicans had different water fountains in California?" And I'm like "you know the more you ask about this guy, the more I realize I don't know much about him."
So...the most non-woke intersection there will no longer be 39th and Portland!
(As an aside, my street rules say do whatever with named streets, but don't fuck around with numbered streets.)
Los Angeles has a weird feature where the east west streets from downtown on south are mostly numbered, except for the arterials, which all have a name instead of a number, so lots of people don’t even realize there is a numbered grid! But it means that the name Martin Luther King replaced Santa Barbara rather than 40th, and Obama replaced Rodeo rather than 37th (and that was particularly good, because this is not the famous Rodeo Dr in Beverly Hills, but just a much bigger road that could easily confuse tourists looking at a map).
I have an irrational hatred for numbered streets that get skipped. Park Avenue in Manhattan should be Fourth Avenue. Broadway in downtown Portland should be 7th Ave. Capitol Blvd. in downtown Boise should be 7th St.
Oddly enough, an exception is when 17th St. got renamed here to Benjamin Harrison due to his visit as a pitch to give Idaho statehood to try to help his (ultimately failed) reelection bid, they didn't skip it, and just moved 17th St and the others one number over to the west.
That's a hilarious anecdote. I think it illustrates the degree that all of these celebrations of people are at least a little astro-turfed, but in order to stick their story needs to transcend their natural constituency, at least a little.
Also...not knowing about Cesar Chavez? Simpsons Did It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_yaGDrNESk
I probably know more about him than the average American, having gone to elementary school in California, but still not a whole hell of a lot.
Now for Speedy Gonzales, please!
Off topic: Karen Bass is getting a YIMBY primary challenger. Good! Fuck her!
but...is she getting a statue?
She deserves to have it NIMBY’ed into oblivion.
It would be the true apotheosis exclamation point to her mayoralty if a statue was proposed for some park near city hall and construction was delayed for years because someone objected to the shadows the statue would cast at some neighboring flowers and filed a CEQA lawsuit in response in order to study the environmental impact on said flowers.
NIMBYism is the worship of built things coupled with a hatred of builders and building.
I actually think it's something a bit different; NIMBY is at its heart the perfect encapsulation of small "c" conservatism in practice if not in theory. Emphasis on the small "c" in conservatism and emphasis on in practice.
It's almost literally standing athwart of bulldozers and yelling stop!
It’s more reactionary in my mind.
NIMBYs don’t mind XYZ “somewhere else”; their politics only manifests as a REACTION to some proposed change near them.
Moreover, they’re a parking brake, not a speed brake. That’s reactionism.
You listen to Matt Welch's interview with her? It's so bad!
Nah, but I listened to her challenger on PSA this AM. Sounds like a reasonable candidate.
I wonder how true her story about the last-minute entry is, tho. It’s believable, but it could also have been a strategic move to seize attention. Looks like there are a bunch of candidates all running to Bass’s housing left, so it’s a risky move to further split the YIMBY vote against Bass.
Hopefully the race consolidates so that a clear YIMBY challenger can survive the primary and unseat Bass. She’s just been so horrible, she’s holding back progress and embarrassing the entire state.
I think it's true. It was supposed to be Caruso, and then Horvath. Good article here: https://lamaterial.com/p/five-days-that-blew-up-the-l-a-mayoral-race
Paywalled.
Copying the AI-slop summary from my subscription:
In early February 2026, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appeared to be heading toward a smooth reelection. With just days left before the filing deadline, no serious challenger had emerged: former schools superintendent Austin Beutner had effectively paused his campaign after the sudden death of his daughter, while other potential candidates hesitated or declined to run. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the city’s condition—rising housing costs, fiscal strain, infrastructure problems, and lingering fallout from the Palisades fire—Bass had consolidated support across key constituencies, leaving the impression that the race might pass without meaningful opposition.
That sense of stability masked deep frustration within the city’s political class. Many civic leaders and operatives believed Los Angeles was adrift, citing concerns about governance, budgeting, and the pace of recovery from recent crises. Still, no one had successfully translated that dissatisfaction into a viable campaign. Figures like real estate developer Rick Caruso and County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath quietly explored bids, while others waited on the sidelines, uncertain whether there was a clear path to victory against an incumbent who had carefully built alliances across labor, business, and political institutions.
The race began to shift dramatically midweek after a damaging news report alleged that Bass had downplayed failures in the city’s fire response. The story intensified scrutiny of her leadership and triggered a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity. Horvath and her allies revisited the possibility of entering the race, even encouraging Caruso to reconsider. At the same time, Beutner officially withdrew, removing the most credible moderate alternative. Caruso briefly weighed a last-minute bid but ultimately decided against it, citing personal and political considerations. With the deadline approaching and no major challenger stepping forward, the field seemed unexpectedly open.
Into that vacuum stepped City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive previously aligned with Bass. Initially not planning to run, Raman grew increasingly frustrated with what she viewed as weak leadership and risky fiscal decisions, particularly around homelessness policy and major city expenditures. As it became clear that no other strong challenger would emerge, advisers and allies encouraged her to consider a campaign. Over the course of a single day, the idea crystallized: by Friday night, after discussions with her husband and political contacts, she decided to enter the race.
On Saturday morning, just hours before the filing deadline, Raman formally declared her candidacy, blindsiding Bass and much of the political establishment. Her entry instantly transformed the contest from a likely non-event into a competitive and uncertain race, defined by ideological tensions within the city’s Democratic coalition and broader dissatisfaction with the status quo. What had seemed like a quiet path to reelection for Bass instead became a volatile political battle shaped by a handful of rapid decisions, personal circumstances, and last-minute calculations among a small circle of influential actors.
Thanks!!
That helps explain more than the sloppy Ballotpedia summary I got. Hopefully she pulls a Mamdani on Bass!
A statue I like isn’t dedicated to an individual but to an event and not a heroic one at that. In Orlando’s main public park there’s a huge statue to the men who died on Bataan and Corregidor.
I like it because A—it’s focused on something not a lot of people know about and B—isn’t a tribute to the great man theory of history. We don’t really need more people to remember Washington in a city center. I don’t think we’re at risk of forgetting.
There used to be a statue of the confederate soldier nearby which has been disappeared. Which I feel like makes sense at like a battleground park like Gettysburg but not in a city center.
When athletes do something great, there is often a call to "build the statue" but rarely are the statues ever actually built. I wonder if costs have become an issue.
Sports statues should have been included in this take. Two incredible statues that Boston should have: Malcom Butler's interception, the iconic image of him jumping the ball and Lockette flying past him. David Ortiz 's grand slam in the ALCS, the security guard raised his hands up just as the outfielder went tumbling legs up into the bullpen.
Yes, to the David Ortiz statue.
I visited Cincinnati last summer, and the city has a number of sports statues, but they have two fields that are actually in the city limits and near each other, so maybe it is the critical mass that gives impetus to the statues.
Boston should absolutely have a statue of Katherine Switzer fighting off Jock Semple to run the Boston Marathon: https://kathrineswitzer.com/1967-boston-marathon-the-real-story/
I bet we get an Ortiz statue eventually. Fenway now has Yaz, Teddy, and the Teammates.
I'm not talking about Ortiz though. I'm talking about the arms up and the legs up image. It's not the most iconic moment in boston sports, I think it happened in game 2 or 3. But it's such a cool image, just make a statue of it.
I consider myself very lucky to have been in New England when that moment happened.
This? Yes we need a bronze relief of that like the 54th Memorial.
https://www.inquirer.com/dailynews/sports/20131015_Boston_s__bullpen_cop__an_arresting_personality.html
Good news! Tom Brady's father, Nick Foles, already has a statue in Philadelphia!
Also: a lot of sport statues are kind of horrible?
Exhibit A: https://i0.wp.com/media.vanityfair.com/photos/58dd7b2765fc5645669ff460/master/pass/t-bad-statues.jpg
I think this is another case of contemporary statues being bad. I’m not informed, but my guess is that all the serious art schools are doing avant-garde stuff so actual representation is just done by hacks now.
Boston added a good Poe statue ten years ago:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2014/10/06/edgar-allan-poe-comes-back-boston/
This is a very cool statue
The Dwayne Wade one too.
https://share.google/KiH3pJflj31QQmp8x
I was going to post this as a top level comment: why are so many of the recent sports statues grotesque?
I think it's just the bad ones that go viral.
https://share.google/KiH3pJflj31QQmp8x
I'm honestly amazed they actually unveiled that instead of asking for their money back.
Chicago has a Michael Jordan statue right outside the United center, but the only reason people go to that area is to go to the UC. They should instead replace the the bronze figure on top of the Chicago board of trade building with a Michael Jordan statue
Why would they do that? Most people don’t even know who he is and he’s barely a top 5 all time player to NBA fans now.
In the Slow Boring comment section, we try to not say things that are wildly untrue.
He's the guy from the memes -- crying, saying "and I took that personally," saying "fuck them kids", telling you to stop it and get some help. Like an '80s or '90s version of a streamer. No?
I can't even say "Nice try" to that one.
Yeah and why are they making a movie about Michael Jackson? Who remembers THAT guy?
Elderly people.
Do you actually think these aren’t well remembered figures? Are you the guy from Memento?
They're well remembered by elderly people.
People don’t know who Michael Jordan is? Lolwut?
Huh I don't think either of those statements are true lol.
big difference between "NBA fans" and "people who live in or visit chicago"
I went to a few Hawks games back when the Dominique Wilkins statue was new and people seemed to like it a lot. Also I used to work by the Charging Bull, and I’ve been to the Rocky statue in Philly, and both get a lot of tourists but the line for Rocky was crazy. We should build more sports statues, real and fictional.
Maybe I’m being too influenced by rage bait content but I get the feeling a lot of sports fans have no interest in what came before especially in the nba.
Like the way people speak of Mikkean, Russel, chamberlain is so dismissive. Apparently everyone on those team was a Plumber. Even David Stern used to talk about the nba as the league of the here and now so to an extent it comes from the top.
I think people are skeptical of the pre-Magic / Bird era NBA.
However, I think they hold up the 80s and 90s era as the pinnacle of the NBA It could be my bubble but the complaining about flopping, load management, 3 point shooting, lack of defense, caring in All Star game, is all up in my feed all the time and in real world conversations, too.
I think there’s a lot of Gen X nostalgia about the NBA in that time.
No complaint about superstars changing the name on the front of the jersey as often as I do laundry? Magic, Bird, and Jordan* stuck with their team, their franchise through thick and thin for their entire careers, and by jove that's how we liked it!
* you heard me.
Bird and Magic retired with their teams because their careers were cut short by illness and injury.
Both should have practiced some load management on and off the court!
Your comment is bad, and you should feel bad!
It’s because none of those guys hold a candle to the alpha and the omega of NBA talent: Michael Jordan.
Huh, I feel like NBA fans are far more likely to discuss great games of the 80s and 90s than fans of other sports. Even my 12 year old nephew does!
I feel like baseball blots out the sun on this metric. People from the 1900s and negro leagues are things like baseball stat nerds know.
Speak for yourself. Here in LA we have three different Kobe statues, a Magic, a Shaq, a Kareem, a Gretzky, a De La Hoya, and even one for legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn.
There's a statue of the "Immaculate Reception" in the Pittsburgh airport. It's made to look real and is not made of marble, but it is quite literally a statue of Franco Harris catching the ball. I like it. And it's one of the standout features of the airport, along with the T-Rex skeleton and a similar full-color lifelike George Washington.
I'd imagine that's a combination of how long public approval of art projects take combined with the Seinfeld issue of rooting for the uniform, not the specific players -- by the time you get through the planning, design, etc., process, the specific player may very well have moved to another team or now be viewed as a greedy jerk because of a contract dispute, etc.
IDK it seems that every arena is now required to include a statue of "someone" (Jeff Bagwell?)
We definitely will need a statue of Justin Garthje fighting Illia Topuria on the White House lawn