Athlete Statues, Reviewed by Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Jerry Saltz (PTFO Vault)

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Speaker 7 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Bruner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

Speaker 10 I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 11 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 12 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 14 Same, they're so light and so comfy, comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 16 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 13 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Speaker 18 Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

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Speaker 24 Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Speaker 26 Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

Speaker 27 See site for details.

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Speaker 38 Okay, so hello, it is me, Pablo, entering, invading even your ears, because I have done something I have not done before,

Speaker 38 which is take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them.

Speaker 38 And so I am.

Speaker 38 On Substack, my newsletter, at www.pablo.show. We'll put a link in the show notes of this episode.
I have turned on paid subscriptions. And if you didn't know, I have a Substack, guess what?

Speaker 38 It's free, and that's still there for you, and it's worth it. But the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool, personalized benefits to come.

Speaker 38 We will make it worth your while. We are figuring out here at PTFO our post-DraftKings future.
And, you know, more good news on that front, I hope, to come.

Speaker 38 But in the meantime, Pablo.show is where you sign up. Click the link in the show notes.
Help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front.

Speaker 38 And this, this episode today, is a hand-picked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Speaker 38 I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. That is an absolute

Speaker 38 work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. It's crap.

Speaker 38 Right after this ad.

Speaker 38 I only know how to use Instagram because a student signed me up and I lost my password.

Speaker 38 But as long as I can stay logged in, I love it I don't know how to do anything though like if I had to post this right I'm unable to do it wait wait wait wait hold on are we are you rolling Chris you want all of this I unfortunately okay we'll start again when you're ready where's we've started okay you've started if that's okay with you

Speaker 38 The thing that I didn't realize until just a second ago when you walked in here is that you don't know your own password to your Instagram account. Yeah, do you know yours?

Speaker 38 I do. What is it? Well, we're gonna what's but is it like I would tell you, but it's a password to everything and it is very hackable.

Speaker 38 And it's like an old address or it's a thing that's very dear to me. I'm like talking to a mentalist, I feel like.
Okay. It's very dear to me.
It's a childhood resonance.

Speaker 38 Got it. Got it.
I know what it is. It's okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 Well, now, now, now I'm very insecure about what I project.

Speaker 38 For people who don't know Jerry Salis, by the way, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure.
I love, I've heard of you. I was thrilled to come here, but I've never listened because I don't.

Speaker 38 Yeah, well, this is the ideal audience for me for this specific episode, I think,

Speaker 38 because I know of you as, of course, the guy who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018.

Speaker 38 I am a magazine nerd, a journalism practitioner, but also acolyte in an era where that's intimidating. Yeah, we're the last of our kind, all these magazines, the New Yorker, New York.

Speaker 38 No one knows what we are. I don't know what we do, but what we do, we do better than everybody else until there's no more need.
for it. And then we'll just go away.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 How long away are we from that?

Speaker 38 It's been a good run. That's all I'll say.
It's been a great run. Yeah, it's like the New York Jets, you know, they have to completely rethink everything.

Speaker 38 We hate them

Speaker 38 and screw them. Yeah, yeah.
Are you a sports fan? I am a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants.

Speaker 38 And that's it.

Speaker 38 And I'm a huge F1 nerd since the TV show and the pre-pandemic and all of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But wait a minute. So Yankees-wise,

Speaker 38 I am here to report that I was at game five of the World Series. Wow.
And that felt like a grotesque

Speaker 38 performance art at a certain point. Yeah.
The fifth inning, just the worst inning in baseball history, arguably just so many self-inflicted wounds. Yeah.
I don't know what to say.

Speaker 38 I'm a fair weather fan. I used to go, oh, we're boring your audience.
Let's move on.

Speaker 38 I want to get to though the idea that you as an authority on art and art criticism are also somebody who is online.

Speaker 38 The reason I started with your password is because you're also somebody with a giant, a legitimately thriving community around your online presence.

Speaker 38 How do you describe your relationship with social media? Follow me at Cherry Saltz.

Speaker 38 I did this by accident. A student signed me up for it, gave me the password, which I don't even know.
I accidentally cannot get on the Twitter or the Facebook.

Speaker 38 No,

Speaker 38 I can't get on Facebook. You were banned from Facebook at one point.
Right. I had over a half million followers.
I have like six or seven hundred thousand now. But who's counting?

Speaker 38 But I am because it's all I have.

Speaker 38 The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and about, you know, three quarters of a million people.

Speaker 38 For me, my second self is my first self. And what I mean by that is my life is so boring and so limited.
I see 25 or 30 shows a week,

Speaker 38 painting shows, sculpture shows at museums, galleries,

Speaker 38 alternative spaces in New York. And then I go home and I become terrified that I have to write about these.

Speaker 38 I've not gone out to dinner with anybody in decades because I'm a social misfit on the one hand and have nothing to talk about. I would sit next to you, a big wig,

Speaker 38 and I would say, no, you are. Whig is large.
And I would say,

Speaker 38 What art shows have you seen? And you would say, I haven't seen anything.

Speaker 38 And then i would sit in silence right so i stopped going and my wife is the co-chief art critic for the new york times a true bigwig by the way a true bigwig she is the real deal if you want to read art criticism read roberta smith i'm sorry i'm such a slow talker but i'm from the midwest um And so our lives together are at home in fear, getting ready to write, sitting down, writing, writing, writing, and then going out and seeing more shows.

Speaker 38 So my online life is where all my fun is. It's where all my talk is.
So why were you suspended from Facebook? Well, in around 2015,

Speaker 38 I was posting a lot of...

Speaker 38 medieval manuscripts which had been digitalized and rediscovered and were being seen for the first time. A lot of these are very violent or the ones I would post.

Speaker 38 And I would post like a woman having her breast cut off, a man being castrated, and I would make some wise guy comment like, you know, this is 13th century, this is 8th century, and me coming into your studio if your work is no good.

Speaker 38 And it turned out that I was not violating any rules of the community. I got a lot of

Speaker 38 correspondence from Facebook. They said

Speaker 38 thousands of people from the art world protested. I mean, what you're describing is stuff that might be found in museums, right?

Speaker 38 Great art. This is like high art.
Great art. But with my unfortunate commentary,

Speaker 38 seemed, and this was just after Trump won

Speaker 38 the first Trump regime and me too had just gotten going and at first I didn't listen I said come on this is great art but after a while they suspended me and then I got back on after 30 days but I also rethought it I thought if there's enough people telling me this is uncomfortable for them, I trust that.

Speaker 38 Men know

Speaker 38 nothing about anything. We barely have an inner life.
We think about seeing women naked. This is a straight man.
We think about seeing a woman naked.

Speaker 38 We think about abstract problems like, will there be time travel? And we think about traffic.

Speaker 38 Other than that, cross out my will there be time travel questions. Yeah, save.

Speaker 38 But as for the other questions that I had prepared to ask Jerry Saltz, who is again simply one of the most respected authorities in the entire world of art, you should know that the premise for this episode first came about because the highest honor that sports bestows upon an athlete or a coach is in fact a work of art.

Speaker 38 A statue.

Speaker 38 A statue, which, as you may have been reminded recently, in the case of, say, Dwayne Wade,

Speaker 38 is not always as popular as the person it seeks to honor.

Speaker 38 And so, I wanted Jerry and his Pulitzer and his three honorary doctorates and his decades of criticism to basically serve as PTFO's unbiased and completely overqualified art critic, as you'll see in a bit here.

Speaker 38 But first, I think you need to understand the origin of his truly incomparable point of view.

Speaker 38 I do want to establish that you yourself, I mean, is it were an artist? Is it a present tense thing? How do you conceive of yourself in that definitional way?

Speaker 38 I graduated at the bottom of my enormous high school class.

Speaker 38 I come from a very dysfunctional suburban Chicago family. I had rented an apartment in the city.
The night I graduated high school, my parents didn't bother coming to our graduation.

Speaker 38 I came home, handed them my diploma, and I left home and I moved into that apartment. I barely went back ever, ever again.
We were friends, but I just didn't care about them.

Speaker 38 They didn't care about me. It was all fine.
I became an artist. I never went to school.
Anybody listening to this, I am a much bigger loser than even you. I have no degrees, never went to school.

Speaker 38 I really don't know anything. I became an artist.
I moved to New York when I was 27.

Speaker 38 The same demons that you have, like before I came in here or last night, that said, what are you doing? You can't do this. You don't know what you're doing.

Speaker 38 I mean, you're pulling the wool over everybody's eyes.

Speaker 38 You have a bad neck or whatever it is.

Speaker 38 So far, all true.

Speaker 38 All those things I listened to and I self-exiled

Speaker 38 from the art world and I became a long-distance truck driver. I still hung out in the art world.
I would work for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 38 I would drive from New York to Florida or to Texas, occasionally to California. Did you have a handle, like the CB? It was the Jewish cowboy.
And I would get on the CB and I would go, Salon, partner.

Speaker 38 Let's talk about the late work of Richard Sarah.

Speaker 38 And none of them ever spoke to me.

Speaker 38 Either I'm a slow talker or they just recognized a rube.

Speaker 38 I did this for 10 years.

Speaker 38 All I did was drive back and forth. I never went anywhere.
I never talked to anybody. I met a prostitute once and she said, you want a date?

Speaker 38 And I got terrified and I ran back to my hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida. That was on the third day I went to work and I swore that from now on I would sleep with every prostitute and I never met

Speaker 38 another one.

Speaker 38 As you can see, I don't put off the vibe. I don't have the sex vibe.
You're good looking.

Speaker 38 People look at you and they want you. I'm old and short and bald and wear glasses.

Speaker 38 You don't know what it was like. And yet in that story, that deeply bleak story that happened to you in Jacksonville, Florida, there is a lesson for me.
And

Speaker 38 by the end of this episode, I will determine exactly what I should take away as a lesson from your

Speaker 38 streak of prostitutelessness. Yeah, nothing.

Speaker 38 And then I became so desperate and so lonely, I thought, I can't do this anymore. And I thought, what could I do? And I thought, I'll become an art critic.

Speaker 38 Now, at that point, I had never written a word in my life. I didn't read.

Speaker 38 I did nothing.

Speaker 38 I thought, oh, critics could get famous, sleep with women, and make a lot of money. None of those things are possible being an art critic at all.
I was going to say. No.

Speaker 38 So. I became an art critic and I started writing absolute bullshit.

Speaker 38 And people seemed to like it. I would write, the late commodified object of post-structuralist capitalism finds its liminal space between interrogating nature and culture.
Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 38 Interrogate's a great art critic word, by the way. And which you should never use.

Speaker 38 Anyway, so I started writing that way. And slowly

Speaker 38 I found my own voice. And at 41, I began working.
So all of you listening this, you haven't even begun yet. Get your acts together, you big babies.
It's hard. No one said it's going to be easy.

Speaker 38 You have to work, work, work, work, work, and you have to show up. I'm afraid you can't be like me and hang back.
I didn't hang back then. As much as I was unfit to hang out, And I could I did it.

Speaker 38 Every night, you have to sacrifice it all. You have to meet other people like yourself.

Speaker 38 You can't be a vampire alone. You have to have a coven or whatever those things are called

Speaker 38 and have each other to. Otherwise, you think you know things other people don't know, and that's unlikely.
You know nothing.

Speaker 38 And you just need to hang out. get to work and work in your own voice.
You have to make an enemy of envy.

Speaker 38 You cannot look out and have your eyes scanning the world and always be comparing yourself to others.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I want to actually jump in on that because as an artist yourself, I do want to reveal that I've done a minor bit of research, Jerry, into your oeuvre, but I jump in to say that you won the National Endowment of the Arts grant.

Speaker 38 You were in museums. You're reviewed in art forum.
You were in galleries.

Speaker 38 So I want to get to the idea of envy, but I also want you to describe to me what you were making, such that maybe those feelings were bubbling to the surface. Well, I had

Speaker 38 lit upon one giant project. I think in retrospect, it was to protect me from having to come up with a new idea every time out.

Speaker 38 I was going to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy, all 100 cantos or chapters. I was going to do 100 works on each of the 100 cantos,

Speaker 38 and it would be a 25-year project. I know I'm nuts.
It would be a 25-year project.

Speaker 38 It began two days before Easter 1975, before everybody here was born. It was supposed to end on

Speaker 38 Easter,

Speaker 38 the year 2000. Okay, that's.

Speaker 38 Ambition is a word that comes to mind. Yeah.
And I I made it as far as the third canto. The work was well received.
But as you know, with all the great stuff happening to you, how old are you?

Speaker 38 I am 39 years old. Already.

Speaker 38 You think I'm over the hill. I'm washed up.
Yeah, my neck actually does hurt. Yeah, mine hurts.
And I have aches and pains. Nothing will protect you.

Speaker 38 So all I can offer is to say to yourself, I'm not going to look at others, the accomplishment of others. I'm going to just look at myself.
You are cause in the matter.

Speaker 38 You created your situation, not all of their success. So make an enemy of envy.

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Speaker 7 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

Speaker 10 I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 11 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 12 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 14 Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 16 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 23 yes lord knows the girls need to breathe also i need my pjs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night that's why i live in my tommy john pajamas plus they're so cute because they fit perfectly put yourself on to tommy john upgrade your drawer with tommy john save 25 for a limited time at tommyjohn.com slash comfort see site for details At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs.

Speaker 30 That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices.

Speaker 32 You can invest and trade on your own.

Speaker 34 Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs.

Speaker 36 With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab.

Speaker 37 Visit Schwab.com to learn more.

Speaker 38 Your view that to love art is to criticize it rigorously. Yeah.

Speaker 38 Do you feel like that is the default in your profession? How has that sort of maybe evolved itself over time? Anybody listening to this podcast will understand this.

Speaker 38 You would never look at every goddamn New York Jets game and say, they're so great. Oh my God, their offensive line is off the charts.
Fantastic. No,

Speaker 38 love

Speaker 38 means also being critical. Movie critics aren't supposed to like everything.
Wine writers don't love every wine. But for some reason, art critics are expected to love everything.

Speaker 38 I would say that we're living in a period of culture where criticism has seemed to leave the building, meaning that everyone's afraid. I know what we're afraid of.

Speaker 38 We're afraid of being called racist, sexist, homophobes, xenophobes.

Speaker 38 So what's happened, I think through a lack of nerve, but also a dramatic shift in what criticism is in the present. Now criticism holds things up.

Speaker 38 We put this woman artist on above us and we hold her up, or that queer artist above us. I'm all for that.
The art world had closed doors for 50,000 years.

Speaker 38 Where are all the Asian artists in Western art history? There aren't any because we didn't believe it was possible.

Speaker 38 I imagine sports is going through something similar, but on a corporate level, as it becomes more and more and more monetized. Oh, sure, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 38 I mean, by the way, speaking of money, right, we're talking in the week that I believe a Magritte piece just sold for $121 million.

Speaker 38 Yeah, or whatever the number is, it's an obscene amount of money. It's offensive.
You could

Speaker 38 fund every rape kit left languishing on the shelves in America for 10 years for that one painting. But on the other hand, somebody wanted the painting.
You only need two people to bid on something.

Speaker 38 That's right. And I hate auctions, but I accept them as part of our current reality.
On the other hand, it leaves an opening for everyone else who isn't obsessed with money. We all want it.

Speaker 38 I get that. We're supposed to be jealous of everyone making 59 million, but it leaves an opening for art to get on with its business.

Speaker 38 And it's doing just great, having huge hits of what Werner Herzog called ecstatic truths, which means opening spaces for consciousness to step outside yourself, to slow time down.

Speaker 38 There's still space for that, but not out there in the market.

Speaker 38 So where does art that is meant to pay tribute fit into your worldview on how art can be beautiful and rigorous and a story in and of itself? Because,

Speaker 38 Jerry, you famously, I'm not overstating this,

Speaker 38 you critiqued a presidential portrait of Barack Obama. Oh, yeah.
Gahinde Wiley. Right.
Very famous artist himself. I said it was shit.

Speaker 38 I said it was

Speaker 38 because,

Speaker 38 listen, I loved the Amy Sherrold portrait of Michelle Obama, mind you. So these two paintings were presented at the same time.
Kahinde Wiley's painting is

Speaker 38 because it's photorealism.

Speaker 38 Good for photorealism. It projects an image.

Speaker 38 You get a picture, you project it, you paint it perfect, you send it to China, they can do it. Kahinde has his studio fill in a cuckoo background and sets Barack on an African chair.

Speaker 38 I guess that's his contribution.

Speaker 38 And as a painting, it is completely unoriginal. As an image of Obama, it's unlike every other presidential portrait ever made.

Speaker 38 So it depends how I judge it as a thing, not as what the artist says it is.

Speaker 38 My wife says no artist owns the meaning of their own work. In other words, each of us, as Oscar Wilde said, when we read a book, we're not reading the author, you're reading yourself.

Speaker 38 When you read Dante, you are reading yourself into Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyoncé, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherlock.

Speaker 38 The Kahinde Wiley portrait, for just those who do. Do you like it? Well, so here's the thing that...
It's realistic.

Speaker 38 So I went to see his work at the Brooklyn Museum at one point, and I was struck immediately by the concept, his sort of thing, which is I'm going to transpose black figures into regal, and you're nodding because, of course, you're familiar with this, but there is a, there's an ornate

Speaker 38 regal aspect to the background, to filigrease, to all of it. And I'm the guy, by the way, who saw that? And I was like, I'm gonna buy the book at the gift shop.
Good, this is cool, good.

Speaker 38 And that is cool. I guess my issue is in retrospect is my evolution in taste happened, um, is that he just kept on doing it

Speaker 38 again and again and again, and it became formulaic, admittedly. Yeah, and it sort of felt like he had one idea and he managed to execute it a zillion times.
Bingo. And you know what?

Speaker 38 There are a lot of artists like that.

Speaker 38 I can tell you their names if you want to go.

Speaker 38 They will never make you go deep. What they'll make you do is they'll tell you what you already know and they'll tell you the same thing over and over again.
And that's very reassuring.

Speaker 38 I don't look to art to be reassured. That's also saying, oh, a black woman could be Napoleon.
That's a cool thought but it would be cooler if you could make it a cooler painting

Speaker 38 and he can't do it and other artists do

Speaker 1 As you've probably heard by now, we've teamed up with BedMGM this season.

Speaker 3 We'll be using BetMGM Lines to make all of our picks and we'll have special offers for our listeners each week.

Speaker 4 If you haven't signed up for BetMGM yet, use bonus code The Athletic and you'll get a one-year subscription to the athletic plus up to a $1,500 first bet offer on your first wager with BetMGM.

Speaker 4 Here's how it works.

Speaker 3 Download the BetMGM app and sign up using bonus code The Athletic.

Speaker 4 Make your first deposit of at least $10,

Speaker 4 place your first bet on any game and claim your voucher for a one-year subscription to the athletic.

Speaker 5 See BetMGM.com for terms, U.S. promotional offers not available in D.C., Mississippi, New York, Nevada, Ontario, or Puerto Rico.
Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLBLER available in the U.S.

Speaker 5 Call 877-8-HOPENY or text HopeNY-467-369 in New York. Call 1-800-NECSTEP in Arizona.
1-800-327-5050 in Massachusetts. 1-800-BETSOF in Iowa.
1-800-270-7117 for confidential help in Michigan.

Speaker 5 1-800-981-0023 in Puerto Rico. First bet offer for new customers only in partnership with Kansas Crossing Casino and Hotel.

Speaker 6 Don't forget, if you haven't signed up for BetMGM yet, use bonus code The Athletic and you'll get a one-year subscription to the Athletic, plus up to a $1,500 first bet offer on your first wager.

Speaker 7 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 9 I'm Hannah Bruner and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

Speaker 10 I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 11 Actually, I never think about underwear.

Speaker 12 That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 14 Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 16 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 13 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Speaker 18 Also, I need my my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

Speaker 21 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Speaker 22 Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Speaker 23 Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Speaker 24 Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Speaker 26 Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

Speaker 27 See site for details.

Speaker 28 At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs.

Speaker 30 That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices.

Speaker 32 You can invest and trade on your own.

Speaker 34 Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs.

Speaker 33 With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab.

Speaker 37 Visit schwab.com to learn more.

Speaker 38 Do you know who Dwayne Wade is?

Speaker 38 I do not know. Who is Dwayne Wade? This is perfect.

Speaker 40 Tonight, there's a mystery brewing in South Florida.

Speaker 38 I can't believe that. Who is that guy?

Speaker 40 It's supposed to be a statue of the man asking that question. Miami Heat legend Dwayne Wade.
But the internet is not quite so sure. That is not D.
Wade. That's Shannon Sharp, The Rock.

Speaker 40 Like, what's that? Outside the Heat Home Arena Sunday, the team unveiled this new tribute to the man known as D. Wade.

Speaker 40 While there's plenty of debate about whose face that is, when you look at the whole statue, it's hard to see anybody else.

Speaker 40 A figure in a heat jersey on top of the scorers table, some will tell you that's gotta be Dwayne Wade.

Speaker 40 With ace, Wade picking this iconic moment from his game-winning steal and shot against the Chicago Bulls in 2009. Wade puts it up for the win!

Speaker 38 So that's Dwayne Wade, great, great athlete. Yes, Dwayne Wade is maybe the greatest player in Miami Heat history.
He is the guy guy posing as such,

Speaker 38 fists bald, mouth open,

Speaker 38 ferocious.

Speaker 38 And it raises the question of when you are making a statue, a work of art that is meant to be a tribute to someone,

Speaker 38 and the first response that everybody has is, that

Speaker 38 doesn't look like Dwayne Wade.

Speaker 38 That's true. It doesn't look anything like him.
What I'll say is that that is an absolute shit work of art because it looks like a little mini

Speaker 38 statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. And it's just got...

Speaker 38 There's nothing to it other than the pose. So you want to, and he looks like the rock.
He looks white, which is fine with me. But, you know, it has no character.

Speaker 38 It has no ambiance it has no internal scale it has no feel for its material it found a photograph scanned it most likely or some

Speaker 38 and reproduced it it's crap

Speaker 38 how much did they pay for it a hundred dollars two hundred

Speaker 38 We don't know exactly what was paid, Jerry. Do you like it?

Speaker 38 I don't.

Speaker 38 But I also want to point out when it comes to resemblance,

Speaker 38 how important is it for the statue of somebody to be actually

Speaker 38 a photorealistic depiction of them in real life? Well, it's not that important to me.

Speaker 38 I can see that it could be important to people who worship that person.

Speaker 38 But I would remind all of those worshipers and fans that all the different pictures of Jesus that they've seen are equally realistic and equal fictions,

Speaker 38 that they're idealized or de-idealized, or maybe you like Francis Bacon's exploding Jesus. Maybe that speaks to you.

Speaker 38 What this says is I wanted to be a realist sculptor, and I found a photograph and I made it without paying much attention to it at all

Speaker 38 other than the signature pose.

Speaker 38 So in the next generation will look at that sculpture and see

Speaker 38 metal.

Speaker 38 They won't see a person. They won't see a likeness.
They'll see a material and even the material isn't that interesting. Right.
The bronze. That's all they're going to see.
I promise you.

Speaker 38 It looks like a lot of

Speaker 38 academic sculpture. You know, the mouth is open.
I can see the teeth. Somebody got in there and filed them down.
Good on them. Good technique, I guess.
That's good.

Speaker 38 I would pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard. At best, there's nothing wrong with that.
That's fun.

Speaker 38 Can I, does it, does it do anything for you if I play a video of the artist's response to a larger?

Speaker 38 I'd love to hear it.

Speaker 40 I would would say to anybody that's even slightly critical, come to Miami. Come to Miami, take a look at it in person, and you'll be very pleasantly surprised.

Speaker 40 Both of the sculptures' artists defending their work, saying Wade visited with them four times, adding they used a computer to get the details right. He approved it on the site,

Speaker 40 he approved it in the photos, and he approved himself.

Speaker 40 And if somebody else doesn't approve him, he can go to Dwayne himself.

Speaker 38 Of course he did. Okay.
So that's Omri Amrani, I should say, the co-sculptor, I guess. They have some sort of

Speaker 38 looks like art by committee. That's what it is.
It looks like art by more than one person with no touch, no hand, only an idea. They're not even artists, those two guys.
They're entrepreneurs.

Speaker 38 They're scammers. They don't know it.
Listen. I feel about you say allegedly, I guess, in there somewhere, but I don't want to

Speaker 38 be able to

Speaker 38 To me, I allege that they might be scammers in this sense, that Oscar Wilde said all the worst poetry is sincere. So what? That they sincerely wanted to make this realistic.
Good on them.

Speaker 38 I didn't take that away from them. I don't think it looks like anybody.
It doesn't look like Dwayne Wade at all. No,

Speaker 38 that's fine. Dwayne Reed liked it, and he's cool with it.

Speaker 38 And could they have made something magnificent? Yes, they could. But they could have also made something much worse.
It could have been a piece of string, you know, tied to a chain, some bull.

Speaker 38 That happens as well. So this is a happy medium between thinking and non-thinking that looks like a photograph in three dimensions.
What do you think of this sculpture?

Speaker 38 Are you familiar with this work? Is that Rocky?

Speaker 38 This is the Rocky statue. I have stood there.
I've posed with him. What I want to say is that some of the greatest sculpture ever made was made in Greece and Rome of athletes.
Yes. Okay.

Speaker 38 Discus throwers.

Speaker 38 Yeah. This.

Speaker 38 As much as I love the first Rocky movie. Oh, and by the way, the kids out there should know this was an Oscar worthy

Speaker 38 screenplay,

Speaker 38 performance all of it actually good yeah watch it you know it has a happy ending whatever but the point is as a work of art it only goes to the way johnson plays you could put the name wade johnson on this it would be the same the pose has oh the dwayne wade you mean the dwayne wade i love that you have no idea who dwayne wade is i mean that so sincerely

Speaker 38 you're the you're you're the most pure sample that we could have for this exercise so i love it let's proceed this is another

Speaker 38 is that you no and that's sylvester stallone

Speaker 38 he's as tall as i am

Speaker 38 i love him he's a big trump guy but he he's done good work and you know what that's true all that's true it's fine you know dwayne reed and and and that guy he he they contributed a lot to the culture yeah they should get statues of themselves sure you should I just hope that yours will be better.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I would, I would like to submit more. Let's see more.
Yeah, can we get Michael Jordan on the screen, please? The greatest of all.

Speaker 38 So, this is how they commemorated the greatest, his airness, outside of the United Center with the Chicago Bulls. I love the figure underneath him.
Can I see the close-up of the

Speaker 38 humunculus beneath him?

Speaker 38 Wow,

Speaker 38 there is a humunculous aspect to the person he is dunking over.

Speaker 38 The figure underneath Michael is great. And he's got an extra face.
His face is falling off. He's like an arm with like 70 figures.

Speaker 38 I mean, here's what's great. The pose of this and the juxtaposition of the super realist.
This is better for one reason.

Speaker 38 The idea of the Baroque means the baroque back in the 1600s was the invention of movies of the cinematic dramatic melodramatic motion

Speaker 38 action action this is an action shot this is a frozen moment in time the basketball is just on michael's fingertips yeah his left hand is giving himself balance his feet are spread out for maximum height and balance The person underneath him becomes meaningless.

Speaker 38 Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped on. It's you.
That's mortal reality, immortal reality.

Speaker 38 Again, the realism is what it is. That's not bad.
He's like his hair under his arm.

Speaker 38 His lip is being clinched. He's like staring at the target.
There's stuff going on there. Yeah.
Who made that one?

Speaker 38 So this was one of the two guys that made the dwayne wade sculpt he his holder work is better yeah no i agree yeah this i agree this is this is an amazing statue yeah that i can imagine uh dwayne wade and miami heat or maybe like can we get our version of that and they and they brought him the thing that we evaluated and that's what makes you a great commentator and podcaster you understand

Speaker 38 the quality has been determined in this case by the market picking something the market already picked. Yes.
Okay.

Speaker 38 And you're getting that self-reiterative

Speaker 38 smoothing out and deadening that that will do. Yeah.
Can we just show you Brandi Chastain for a second? Brandy Chastain, all-time American women's soccer player.

Speaker 38 And this is her Hall of Fame plaque, the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame. And this is her in real life.
What's the sport that brings soccer?

Speaker 38 I would call it a travesty of

Speaker 38 mimosis, meaning it doesn't look anything mimetic art because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde, and made her into Gertrude Stein.

Speaker 38 And for that,

Speaker 38 that's kind of interesting.

Speaker 38 Or, you know, like a Russian policewoman, but

Speaker 38 Eleanor Roosevelt, perhaps. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that.
No. If I were Brandy, I might be a little miffed, but, you know, I don't think athletes even think that way.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 Her view was, I think, to your point, quote, it's not the most flattering, but it's nice. Yeah, that's not untrue.
Right. It's good to be remembered.
Right.

Speaker 38 Not great is that she also looks like Gary Busey, I guess. God.

Speaker 38 Yes. That's the grimace.
I don't know where the grimace came from.

Speaker 38 I think it's like the rictus of what is her left cheek on the right side of the image, just like the indentation feels Buseyan. Wow, yeah, you got it.
It's a picture of Gary Busey.

Speaker 38 They could change it out.

Speaker 38 Yeah, yeah. And then lastly, the last, I think, case study for you is just Cristiano Ronaldo, who I presume you have no idea.
I do know him. Okay.

Speaker 38 Because soccer is a great sport and American men can... What?

Speaker 38 So this is...

Speaker 38 could be a great piece of folk art. That is a great piece of

Speaker 38 up, super crazy,

Speaker 38 manneristic, meaning the neck is about a foot and a half long,

Speaker 38 the hair is standing up and out, the face is completely crooked, the eyes are asymmetric. The eyes are

Speaker 38 looking at with sheer madness.

Speaker 38 I'd love to meet that artist. I mean, that is wild.
This artist's name is Emmanuel Santos. That's the artist? That is Ronaldo.
Okay.

Speaker 38 That is Cristiano Ronaldo. So, by the way, does this statue look more like the artist who made it or Cristiano Ronaldo, famed as one of the most angular, beautiful, symmetrical faces in human history?

Speaker 38 Your mileage may vary. That's well said.
I think if we saw the picture of the artist, we don't know. But that is one great sculpture.
Whoa. So you love this one.
Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo.

Speaker 38 That's fine. Call it.
In a vacuum, you love this specific work. I would tell that artist to push all these ideas, get rid of the computer, get rid of the realism, and just go for it.
Yeah. That's mad.

Speaker 38 There's one more thing I'd like you to evaluate. Yes.

Speaker 38 If you can hold

Speaker 38 until after the break.

Speaker 38 Jerry, you've stuck around very generously, and we've brought in Sophie from the other side of the glass. Love it.
Um, because this is an original work that I have not seen.

Speaker 38 Uh, so we'll be viewing this for the first time together, genuinely. Okay, not a bit.
I have not seen this. I'll let you react to it first.
Okay. Um, I want to give some identifying information.

Speaker 38 This is by Jim Victor and Marie Pelton, a couple from Pennsylvania. Their chosen medium

Speaker 38 is

Speaker 38 butter.

Speaker 38 And Sophie, will you unveil

Speaker 38 the sculpture

Speaker 38 very delicately from the,

Speaker 38 I mean,

Speaker 38 what do you think? I... It's facing him now.

Speaker 38 I know what I think. I don't know if I've ever ever felt the feeling that I'm feeling right now.
Okay.

Speaker 38 What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face? It's hard not to think that this person

Speaker 38 is

Speaker 38 more handsome than

Speaker 38 me.

Speaker 38 I should probably reveal for the audio audience that my staff has commissioned. a butter sculpture of me.
Wow.

Speaker 38 It's larger than life size, slightly larger. It's really impressive.
It's, I,

Speaker 38 the, the texturing of my hair,

Speaker 38 I want to say, I didn't, I don't know if there's a better, I don't know if bronze can do what butter is doing right now.

Speaker 38 There is a bit of a,

Speaker 38 I'm surmising, I think.

Speaker 38 I got it coming. Yeah, let's rotate.
Let's rotate the microphone for

Speaker 38 this little critic salt. I think you can just rotate it this way.
All right, I'm coming around.

Speaker 38 This is incredible. Like, it is covered in butter.
This old base.

Speaker 38 Wow.

Speaker 38 See, I thought you looked like JFK.

Speaker 38 Here, touch it. It's so sculpture.
Touch it. Jerry and I are touching it, and it's and it's legitimately

Speaker 38 dairy. It's butter.
It's legit dairy. It's Naples yellow butter.

Speaker 38 You have a great open collar, a t-shirt.

Speaker 38 Yep, yep. Do you have a mustache? I do.
In this, I have what I aspire.

Speaker 38 I have the mustache of my dreams.

Speaker 38 Butter me has the facial hair I desire. They were generous with

Speaker 38 a healthy serving above my upper lip.

Speaker 38 You look like a statesman, actually. I do.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 I look like I am.

Speaker 38 More in charge than I feel day to day. Have you ever evaluated a butter sculpture before? Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture, being from the Midwest.
Oh, that's right.

Speaker 38 Yeah, we have in Wisconsin, there's a whole tradition of it. I'm mad for it.

Speaker 38 I also looked at ice sculptures.

Speaker 38 A corn sculpture is a big favorite of mine.

Speaker 38 This is just lovely. I think it's just lovely.
I want to touch it a lot. I'm going to touch it a little.
Yeah, I mean, if you were to. Put his head next to it.

Speaker 38 Let me get my phone and take its picture. Jerry's going to take a photo of this.
And

Speaker 38 I'll make you famous for something.

Speaker 38 I'm staring at myself in the glass. You are.
What do you see? To my butter self.

Speaker 38 There.

Speaker 38 If there was no one else around in this room, there's not a lot I wouldn't do to this butter sculpture of me.

Speaker 38 Butter me and I would explore each other.

Speaker 38 Well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately

Speaker 38 object. Yeah, I feel like something good has happened that I don't entirely want to celebrate, but inside.
You have to celebrate this. Inside, I am overjoyed.

Speaker 38 In my eyes, they're telling a story. What's the story being told? These are the eyes of someone who is encountering.
Right.

Speaker 38 Maybe this is literal. Maybe this is figurative, Jerry.
They're encountering their first prostitute

Speaker 38 in Jacksonville, Florida. And they're thinking to themselves,

Speaker 38 I think it's time. God, you're a bigger man than I am.

Speaker 38 Is there a way to preserve this? Apparently we have a couple of hours. Okay.

Speaker 38 I want you to document it because it'll get better.

Speaker 38 It'll get much better as as it loses its structural integrity and becomes more abstract and melts.

Speaker 38 There's an artist named Ers Fischer. Yeah.
Oh, yep. A Swiss visual artist.
And put in candle sculptures. It's huge melted candle sculptures.
Right. Document that.

Speaker 38 You'll get famous and you can get the hell out of the podcast game. Oh, God.

Speaker 38 I've learned, I found out so much today, Jerry.

Speaker 38 Mostly that maybe you actually can buy love.

Speaker 38 You got that for free.

Speaker 38 You didn't need anything. You just needed your beautiful self

Speaker 38 and art. Jerry Saltz.
Thank you. I'm going to remember this day for the rest of my life.

Speaker 38 I will too.

Speaker 38 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark Media production,

Speaker 38 and I'll talk to you next time.

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