Tangent but opportunity to vent: In 2001 I was on a first date — a confident, successful, and very heavy woman with a smart, attractive man at my side — when the trailer for Shallow Hal appeared on the screen. A couple minutes of people almost gagging at the idea of a (heavy, sloppy) guy falling for a fat girl,…

But you also shouldn’t have taken the photo in the first place.

THIS. She learned about privacy, but not about how not to be a total piece of shit person.

To me, her only likeable manifestation has been Margot Tennenbaum.

Why is she so desperate to be seen as just a normal person? You aren’t a normal person. You spend $600 on a t-shirt; I buy my t-shirts for $2 at Forever 21.

I know! Her tone is always like “Even I, you plebes. Even I.” In her head she thinks it makes her sound relatable.

She has a point. Whenever a man tells me to steam my vagina I spend all day sitting on the kettle. But when she does I mock her.

“Women, in general, get a lot of pushback, especially if you’re successful and attractive.”

Except...

This piece is controversial, uncomfortable, awkward proportionally, and not visually beautiful. It is complex, takes a while for the eye to figure out what is going on, and that simultaneous moment of “aha!” and “thats terrible” is a rare emotional experience. I love everything about it. The precedent this sets is…

(that’s completely aside from whether is should have been made. A gallows jungle gym strikes me as intentionally sensationalistic... I’m not quite sure what deeper point it’s trying to make?)

If “I’m offended” is now the standard to have art removed from public, God help us.

Who gets to make the call? Who gets to be the art police? Is it just the volume of the anonymous digital rabble that determines the fate of the piece? How many thumbs down clicks? Or is it the identity of the person who fires the first shot? “As a ______ this piece is problematic” and poof, the artists intent is…

Dude, do you even art?

Yes. I was a student at a religious institution when Serrano’s Piss Christ hit the scene. Obviously the reaction in my mileu was far from happiness and joy. Having lived through that might help explain why an audience getting pissed off (ahem) over art doesn’t strike me as legitimate criticism of the art.

Yes I’m going to go ask permission the next time I get inspired to create something...

But that isn’t really what’s going on here. It is actually telling the story of white oppression of lots of groups, from the perspective of someone who has the history of being the oppressor, which is a legitimate perspective to bring into art. As someone else said “it’s a white man recreating the tools of his…

Dude. Do you even art?

I went to a seminar on the piece at the Walker pre-installation. As far as I am aware, it was not advertised as a play ground. It was advertised as interactive. There’s a big difference.
However, I do think that the public thinks of it as a playground. I think the director of the museum thinks, “this is a serious…

There is a lot to tease apart here. I think the director of the Museum made a big mistake by not creating dialogue with local groups. Conversely, I don’t know if I would blame the artist for this; while the piece might not work as the artist intended it to, I think both his responsiveness to local groups and his…