Crescents

There's a lot of aesthetic discussion about the use of crescents to commemorate 9/11. Well, I don't know anything about modern art, but I know what I like, and this would be the prettiest crescent of all.

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There's something deeply wrong with modern artists, especially the ones who get subsidized and supported by governments. They seem to view themselves as Coyote the Trickster, whose duty is to play nasty and expensive pranks on the dumb yokels.

I'm reminded of a fellow named Dale Eldred, who died some years ago.

Eldred was based in Kansas City. His cruelest joke was played on the downtown development council of Kansas City, Kansas. For those unfamiliar with the area, KCK is a drab industrial city, which feels more like Cleveland or Toledo than anything you'd expect to find in Kansas. Eldred was commissioned to redesign several blocks of the dying downtown. He drew, and the poor deluded city proceeded to build, a horrible parody of KCK's sharp hills. It was like one of those "Magic Gravity Mountain" tourist traps, with each block rising and falling unpredictably. My VW could scarcely negotiate it; a normal-sized car scraped its bumpers at each corner. After a month or two, the remaining stores left, and the whole thing was finally demolished.

Later, KU paid Eldred to build this thing, sort of like a railroad trestle on stilts,



in a residential area. Though Lawrence is a decidedly artsy town, even the Laurentians couldn't stand this monstrous rabbit trap, which felt -- and probably was -- deadly. Citizens repeatedly 'petitioned for redress' as shown here, and after several repaints, KU finally moved the atrocity to an obscure location on campus.

When will we learn? Artists never commemorate anything, they just laugh at us, and we pay them to do it.
  ¶ 1:18 PM