Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Best, Worst and Sexiest Trophies in Sports, with Legendary Art Critic Jerry Saltz About this episode The Heisman? "An American classic." The World Cup? "Uncircumcised." A white-gloved Pablo welcomes back New York magazine's unfiltered, Pulitzer Prize-winning arbiter of taste to evaluate the history of competitive hardware as sculpture — with a curated tour of shiny balls, stolen chalices and one gigantic mystery box.
• Previously on PTFO: Athlete Statues, Reviewed by Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Jerry Saltz https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUzMDVkODgtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtZWI4OWFlZDg2YjNk
• Subscribe to New York magazine https://subs.nymag.com/magazine/subscribe/official-subscription.html?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=pablotorre#/ for more Jerry Saltz
• Subscribe to The Athletic https://theathletic.onelink.me/eNRy/ptfo
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Pablo Torre? This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools.
1:42 Pablo Torre? It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at apollo.io. That's apollo.io. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
2:08 Speaker 04 It looks like an uncircumcised penis held in his hand with the skin being pulled back.
2:16 Pablo Torre? Right after this.
2:24 Pablo Torre? Sir.
2:25 Speaker 04 Hello. Great to see you.
2:27 Pablo Torre? I'm coming back.
2:28 Speaker 04 Hey. I'm no Sarah Jessica Raphael. What's her name? Parker.
2:33 Pablo Torre? That's right.
2:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:34 Pablo Torre? In my universe, your own Sex in the City is an even better series.
2:39 Speaker 04 Back at you. Congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize.
2:44 Pablo Torre? You know, just wanted to be able to hang out with you credibly.
2:47 Speaker 04 Except, I can't figure out how to monetize it, at all.
2:52 Pablo Torre? I was hoping that that would be what we found out today. How do we make money off of this thing?
2:56 Speaker 04 You might be able to. But I figured it'd just keep me in a job for 18 more months, and I used it up.
3:05 Pablo Torre? Well...
3:06 Speaker 04 Enjoy it at the top.
3:07 Pablo Torre? We got two to three months already behind us, so the clock is ticking.
3:12 Speaker 04 It is.
3:13 Pablo Torre? So Jerry, thank you for being back.
3:15 Speaker 04 Great to be here.
3:17 Pablo Torre? You're surrounded by cloaks and shadowed figures, and I want people who are not watching to have the joy of Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine's chief art critic, and one of the great New Yorkers that I've ever met.
3:33 Speaker 04 Thank you, fellow Pulitzer Prize winner.
3:36 Pablo Torre? Just two guys hanging out, surrounded by things veiled from public view. And I would love for you to just describe, as we go through here, what we get to see together.
3:49 Speaker 04 Okay.
3:50 Pablo Torre? As we reveal them, and I will give you these white gloves. You don't have to wear them just yet, but I'll throw them at you, because we will get to a point at which we have to engage the giant mystery box.
4:04 Speaker 04 I have no idea what we're gonna see.
4:07 Pablo Torre? You're also the subject of a new documentary called House of Criticism.
4:10 Speaker 04 Yes.
4:10 Pablo Torre? Was just a Tribeca, was so well-reviewed, but I want to say that you are missing... Do you mind if I say that she is your better half?
4:19 Speaker 04 Oh god, yeah, no. She is, by far. Roberta Smith.
4:23 Pablo Torre? Yes.
4:24 Speaker 04 Art critic, former art critic of the New York Times.
4:27 Pablo Torre? And we'll show a still frame here of you and Roberta Smith.
4:32 Speaker 04 Boom!
4:32 Pablo Torre? Look at that, as you're on your knees. Praying to her, it seems like.
4:37 Speaker 04 I'm praying to her and to one of the greatest paintings in all of modernism. Picasso's Five Whores of Da Vanyon Street, or Demoiselles de Avanyon, painted in 1906 that changed everything, everything.
4:57 Pablo Torre? I dare say that that Pablo cannot hold a candle to what's going on here in the studio with me.
5:03 Speaker 04 I dare say you're insane.
5:06 Pablo Torre? Well, the last time, the last time you were here, you reviewed a Pablo, as it were. And for those who don't remember your last appearance, could you please describe this?
5:18 Speaker 04 Oh, a butter sculpture of my host Pablo. That's pretty [bleep] good. That's a good, what, didn't I like it?
5:28 Pablo Torre? You did like it. Uh, Butter on Pablo 2024 by the award-winning food sculptors Jim and Marie Pelton of Pennsylvania.
5:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:36 Pablo Torre? I think you compared it to almost like a JFK-style.
5:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:40 Pablo Torre? Uh, bust.
5:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's your look. It's kinda cool because it's too big.
5:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
5:46 Speaker 04 It's bigger than you are slightly. It's still good.
5:50 Pablo Torre? And it was good until I would say this happened. Could you describe what you're seeing?
5:56 Speaker 04 I'm seeing a knife slice through the front of Pablo's face and serve it up in chips and shards.
6:05 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
6:07 Speaker 04 It was good. I would have rather it been a cake.
6:10 Pablo Torre? I briefly, I recall I being the butter me for my wife and child who are listening. Uh, I briefly did make out with some other art critics in Washington Square Park. They came by and planted one on us.
6:22 Speaker 04 Wow.
6:23 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
6:23 Speaker 04 Congratulations. I never get that.
6:26 Pablo Torre? And as a consequence, I got my face cut off. But there is one brief update we have for you in the athlete statue genre. That's what you came on to review last time.
6:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:36 Pablo Torre? Because as an evolution of what it is to depict the human form in tribute.
6:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:42 Pablo Torre? We do have this. And so this is Argentina, Patagonia. This is in the desert there. Could you describe what you see here?
6:53 Speaker 04 This is a enormous sculpture. How tall is it?
6:57 Pablo Torre? Eighty-five foot, seventy tons.
7:00 Speaker 04 Eighty-five feet of Messi skidding after having just scored a goal with his right arm raised to the heavens, preaching like Zeus. Goal! It's epically great.
7:16 Pablo Torre? Oh, $130,000 is what this cost. The Times say that this was a public funded project. This is a remote oil town in the middle of the Patagonian desert. The local sculptor, his name is Aldo Barrosa?
7:30 Speaker 04 Great artist, Aldo.
7:31 Pablo Torre? And he wielded oil pipes into the shape of Messi's skeleton.
7:36 Speaker 04 Wow. It's like he's kind of naked below. It reminds me of a famous artist, Tracy Eamon, who's from England and their greatest sculptor. And above, it's like a half a body plunked on this sort of open-legged mass. It's tremendous.
7:56 Pablo Torre? He does look like he's kind of like Winnie the Pooh-ing it now that I think about it.
8:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:02 Pablo Torre? Like, there's a top and there's the bottom.
8:04 Speaker 04 Well, that looks like he's got an enormous penis from this angle.
8:09 Pablo Torre? Yeah, from the back now.
8:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, from the behind. It's kind of great because it's cement. That's what makes it great. The rawness, the materiality is not hidden.
8:24 Speaker 04 There's no lie to this sculpture. It says, "I am artificial. I am a monument to the eternal God, Messi."
8:35 Pablo Torre? His, like, jersey, his shirt, they've worked the folds in. You can see the fold that they created, which is so almost beautifully precise. And then down below, it looks like he has a giant [BLEEP].
8:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, it's awful for, for me as a Jewish boy. I do not want to see, I don't need to see that. But no, it's, it's, it's enormous, as it were.
9:00 Pablo Torre? Yeah, and the ass is just sort of just like a flat.
9:03 Speaker 04 That's good.
9:04 Pablo Torre? Okay.
9:05 Speaker 04 Yeah. This is a great work of art. It parallels the very large-scale Melania sculpture.
9:14 Pablo Torre? I'm looking that up right now.
9:15 Speaker 04 It's homemade in her birth city. It's pretty cool.
9:21 Pablo Torre? Are you familiar with that portrait of, I think it was, was it Mother Mary that got sort of like disfigured?
9:29 Speaker 04 Oh, yes. Yeah, the, um, it's a painting.
9:33 Pablo Torre? The 17th century painting of the Virgin Mary that got ruined after a furniture repairman was paid approximately $1,300 to restore it.
9:41 Speaker 04 It is a tremendous painting now, because there's no other Madonna on earth remotely like it.
9:49 Pablo Torre? And I just want to split screen the wooden Melania in Slovenia with that disfigured, uh, Mother of Christ.
9:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, good combinations there. Just great.
10:01 Pablo Torre? I, I'm sure there's a larger message there, but I'm not the guy with the Pulitzer for art criticism, so I'll leave.
10:05 Speaker 04 Well, I'm not the guy with the Pulitzer for a podcast.
10:10 Speaker 04 So.
10:28 Pablo Torre? I am, though, going to let you now, if you could put on your gloves, your white gloves.
10:34 Speaker 04 Happily.
10:35 Pablo Torre? Yes, and I will do the same because we are gonna have you open the little black box in front of us.
10:41 Speaker 04 Okay.
10:42 Pablo Torre? As a way into this strange podcast that you have once again consensually agreed to participate in.
10:48 Speaker 04 Yes.
10:48 Pablo Torre? And it'll be the first of the multiple divine mysteries that are surrounding us, and so...
10:57 Speaker 04 That's the size of the World Cup sculpture? That's it? Let me see it.
11:01 Pablo Torre? Yeah, there you go.
11:02 Speaker 04 I always thought it was enormous.
11:04 Pablo Torre? I should admit, of course, this is a unfortunate replica of the World Cup trophy. They wouldn't let us have the real one?
11:15 Speaker 04 Well, I'm sorry.
11:17 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I think they've maybe watched other episodes that we've done and they're like, no, that's not okay. This one is, uh, yeah, about, I don't know, five, four, five inches.
11:30 Speaker 04 Size of a butt plug, basically.
11:32 Pablo Torre? A butt plug-sized replica.
11:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:35 Pablo Torre? And God bless if your butt plug exceeds about four inches in length, which is what I'm told in my ear this technically is, but hey.
11:42 Speaker 04 And it looks vaguely phallic.
11:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
11:45 Speaker 04 But I love it because of its abstraction.
11:49 Pablo Torre? Okay, so the real one, I'll set up the dimensions.
11:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:52 Pablo Torre? 14.4 inches high, about three and a half times bigger than what you're holding. And what does it look like in its abstraction?
11:59 Speaker 04 So it looks like it's a ball which has a map of the globe of the world on it. It's held up by figures, each abstractly, sort of with their arms outreached, with their mouth open, their heads cocked back, and a kind of a twisting stem that looks, again, vaguely like a penile shaft with veins. But I don't say that to be funny.
12:30 Pablo Torre? No.
12:31 Speaker 04 But the abstraction realism...
12:35 Speaker 04 Just the sculpting of it is pretty fantastic.
12:39 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
12:40 Speaker 04 I could imagine hoisting that over one's head, feeling pretty darned good.
12:46 Pablo Torre? So this was commissioned originally by FIFA for the 1974 World Cup. The Italian sculptor, his name is Silvio Gazzaniga.
12:56 Speaker 04 It looks like a kitsch, Italiano kind of sculptor's ideal in the 70s of what abstraction would look like. Frankly, I don't like to talk this way, but it looks like an uncircumcised penis, the skin being pulled back.
13:16 Pablo Torre? I think that's absolutely correct.
13:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you just have to say what things look like. It's all gold.
13:22 Pablo Torre? Yep.
13:23 Speaker 04 It's got a-
13:23 Pablo Torre? 18 karat.
13:24 Speaker 04 18 karat, and it's got a base. We don't know why. The artist never asked himself about it. He just wanted to do that, so he put it on a dumb base, and that's what it is.
13:37 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say, something that we should be evaluating here is, to borrow the language of the metaphor and the literal object, the base of the thing.
13:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, right, yeah.
13:47 Pablo Torre? Because that's a bit tossed on, it kind of feels like.
13:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:51 Pablo Torre? It's like the envelope for the card.
13:52 Speaker 04 That's a good metaphor.
13:54 Pablo Torre? Did you really think about what it's gonna be sitting on?
13:56 Speaker 04 I wonder if other trophies have given the base more thought, or maybe the thought comes delivered whole, as if from the universe, where no one else will ever notice the base, except, you know, a pointy-headed art critic.
14:15 Pablo Torre? Well, I should point out that the World Cup trophy that you're seeing is not the original World Cup trophy. That's the current one. It was commissioned because something strange happened to the previous trophy, which I do need to point out as we show that visual. This is what is known as the Jules Romaine Cup. It's an actual cup, kind of, as you can see.
14:39 Speaker 04 It's a Neo-Greek revival, Neo-Fascisti. It's a woman, not bare-breasted, but with enormous breasts, held in by her toga, with her arms holding an urn filled with the deceased's ashes. And she's got great wings underneath.
15:03 Pablo Torre? Nike, the guy- Goddess of victory is the uh is is the lady with the boobs.
15:07 Speaker 04 The new one is much better.
15:09 Pablo Torre? Really?
15:10 Speaker 04 Much.
15:11 Pablo Torre? Oh, wow.
15:12 Speaker 04 Because this looks like your standard European uh kind of idea of what a trophy should look like. It's not gaudy.
15:23 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
15:23 Speaker 04 And nor is it specific. That could be for billiards. It doesn't matter. It could be for tiddlywinks.
15:32 Pablo Torre? Yes.
15:32 Speaker 04 It's not specific to the game of football.
15:37 Pablo Torre? I was gonna ask you whether the cup makes it more satisfying because you're actually living up to the name of the tournament, but you're saying this looks like a generic.
15:49 Speaker 04 Worse, in the sense that that's not quite a cup. It's an eight-sided, you know, hexagonal, octagonal nut bolt with like an ashtray indentation.
16:03 Pablo Torre? It's a nut bolt.
16:04 Speaker 04 It's not really saying much other than it's great that you won it. But I I think the new one is better because it's gaudier, it's kitscher, it's gold.
16:17 Pablo Torre? It is gold.
16:18 Speaker 04 And that is FIFA and Trump and you know, the new world order. It's what the world is right now.
16:27 Pablo Torre? And what you're saying is that the representation of the climate sociologically, politically, emotionally.
16:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:37 Pablo Torre? That is more meaningful uh as a matter of what does this say about the people who are awarding it and receiving it?
16:44 Speaker 04 Absolutely, and that is part and parcel of the object itself. And anyone who's holding it or talking about it is seeing that without recognizing that that's what they're seeing.
17:00 Pablo Torre? Yes.
17:00 Speaker 04 Today, one of the contents, the content of that sculpture, that cup, that whatever it is.
17:08 Pablo Torre? Uncircumcised.
17:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, yes, is today and our values today. I would imagine that most trophies are now gold.
17:18 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I I should point out that the brief history of the old trophy is funny.
17:24 Speaker 04 What is it?
17:27 Pablo Torre? In 1938.
17:29 Speaker 04 Ah, ah, yeah.
17:30 Pablo Torre? I know, we're getting, we're getting, we're getting deep into it now. An Italian FIFA official hid the cup in a shoebox under his bed to prevent the Nazis from getting a hold of it.
17:39 Speaker 04 Mmm.
17:40 Pablo Torre? Twenty years later, 1958, journalists believe it may have disappeared after the Germans won the World Cup.
17:45 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
17:46 Pablo Torre? Sixty-six comes around and a collie, a dog named Pickles,
17:50 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
17:51 Pablo Torre? found the cup, and the cup was wrapped in a newspaper under a garden bush because it had been stolen in London, apparently. And the originator of it, Jules Romain, who was the former FIFA president, he'd wanted the trophy to remain in perpetuity in the possession of the first nation to win it three times, which Brazil did in 1970, only for 1983 to come along and a bunch of apparently hooded thieves broke into the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation. They tied up the night watchmen, took off with the World Cup, esconced it with it, along with some other stuff. And the investigators found the robbers, not the trophy. And they said maybe it had been melted into gold bars or something like that.
18:33 Speaker 04 Right, that makes sense. It's like El Chapo stuff. It's like very narcos. It's very FIFA narcos, corrupt, post-fascist.
18:45 Pablo Torre? Yes.
18:45 Speaker 04 It's a, it's a fitting story, Pablo.
18:49 Pablo Torre? And I should point out for legal reasons that a convicted Argentine gold dealer testified that he had not melted the cup down. I guess he could sue us from the grave.
18:58 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
18:59 Pablo Torre? And so, I guess what I'm saying is the original World Cup trophy may still be out there somewhere, floating.
19:05 Speaker 04 Wow.
19:06 Pablo Torre? I do want to ask you, in the World Cup context, do you like perhaps this one anymore or any less? This is the current Women's World Cup trophy, and I don't know how you would describe what this is going for. Well, this is what they got going uh for the women.
19:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a twisted uh spiral gold with a soccer ball in its sort of grip. It's not very good, I'm afraid. And women in America are the only ones that have kept the game alive for so long. I want the game to become much, much more popular here. It's a game that you have to be so witty to to play at because everything is against you. You can't use your hands and that's our most natural, you know, thing. You have to use your feet. There's no timeouts, except for the hydration breaks, bull****.
20:12 Speaker 04 Like life, it never stops and you only score rarely.
20:17 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
20:17 Speaker 04 And that is exactly like life. And it can come down to a tiny, tiny thing making you score or not score.
20:29 Pablo Torre? Now that we're into the uh sort of grand sweep of metal balls on top of bases and such. I do want to just speed run through some of this. I just wanted to know if you recognize what this is.
20:42 Speaker 04 Well, I do because it recently came to the New York Knicks. It is an abstract rendition below of a basket elongated.
20:54 Pablo Torre? Behold the Larry O'Brien championship trophy, as it is officially known.
21:00 Speaker 04 I don't think it's a great sculpture.
21:03 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
21:03 Speaker 04 Honestly, there's a kind of plainness to it again that this bizarre, kitsch, ugly object.
21:11 Pablo Torre? Tiny World Cup trophy.
21:13 Speaker 04 You know, doesn't have, but that has real scale.
21:17 Pablo Torre? This is Tiffany and Co. Dining and creating this in 1977.
21:21 Speaker 04 It's on a huge tilt. Why? We don't know.
21:25 Pablo Torre? Yeah, it's a regulation sized basketball at the very top.
21:28 Speaker 04 So that's one to one scale of the ball.
21:32 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
21:33 Speaker 04 But like two to one of the basket and there's this kind of insane world's fair base. It must be amazing to hold and almost impossible to hold up with one hand.
21:48 Pablo Torre? Yes, 29 pounds, the Larry O'Brien trophy, named after the former NBA commissioner and former postmaster general Lawrence O'Brien.
21:55 Speaker 04 There you go. Do you like this sculpture?
21:58 Pablo Torre? You know, part of the reason I wanted to do this is because I've conditioned my brain to associate this with the pinnacle of something.
22:05 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
22:06 Pablo Torre? And now, hearing you say what you're saying, I'm like, this kind of sucks, actually.
22:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, it isn't great. I would love to see an actual artist make one of these things and no one would like it. But it would push the thought into some other dimension. That's very, very literal.
22:29 Pablo Torre? Yes, you can even see the etching of the net.
22:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, and the writing of the National Basketball Association is very large. You know, I like the sculptures when they get personalized or abstract or unaccounted for. The ones that might have names written on them, I think that's a cool idea. I want my name on the art critics trophy, but there are none, so.
22:59 Pablo Torre? Uh, not yet.
23:01 Speaker 04 Okay.
23:01 Pablo Torre? Not yet. Um, I would like you to evaluate, though, this because this feels of a similar kind of aesthetic in that regard. The Vince Lombardi Trophy.
23:13 Speaker 04 Okay.
23:15 Speaker 04 This is complex for me because this is America to me. Football is a sport I I love. And the the object itself is like America. It's not specific, but it is only what it is. So I suppose that it makes it quite specific. It is a tilted silver football on a sort of large trapezoidal T.
23:50 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
23:50 Speaker 04 And it celebrates the one aspect of football that every single person feels that she or he could do, which is kick the ball. So it's a very egalitarian, Jeffersonian ideal and reduced, almost minimal. When was this one designed?
24:14 Pablo Torre? 1966.
24:15 Speaker 04 Yes, at the height of American movement called minimalism, which was stripping down and simplifying a form. The football has no texture.
24:28 Pablo Torre? No.
24:28 Speaker 04 It has the.
24:30 Pablo Torre? The stitches.
24:31 Speaker 04 The stitches, but no texture. The trapezoid itself just has our first president, Vince Lombardi, written on it. Look at that. Does that just say football? Nothing special, and you can't have it. You know, it's kind of great.
24:48 Pablo Torre? The origin of it, apparently, because this was made by Tiffany's as well. And what they did was, apparently, the design chief knew nothing about football. He bought a toy ball at FAO Schwarz, if you can recall the toy store that I grew up also going to and fantasizing about. He put the ball on his kitchen table, ate a bowl of cornflakes at said table. And in an apparent epiphany, it seems, he started cutting up the empty cereal box, turned it into the trophy base, and voila.
25:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:18 Pablo Torre? Americana.
25:18 Speaker 04 He made something that says football to any football fan. To nobody else is it special. But I think that's a speciality of all of these trophies, except maybe, again, the.
25:37 Pablo Torre? The uncircumcised.
25:38 Speaker 04 The World Cup one.
25:39 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
25:40 Speaker 04 Bizarre.
25:41 Pablo Torre? I love how you are entranced by the tiny trophy.
25:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:46 Pablo Torre? As we present you with all of its competitors and yet you return to the veins.
25:52 Speaker 04 It could be because it's the only material thing I'm seeing and so it's presence is a form of grace and its presence keeps me pulled magnetically back to it. It could just be that simple.
26:09 Pablo Torre? Well, I do think we need to enter into the evidence here some other gravitational fields. But before we do, I just got to show you this.
26:20 Speaker 04 Whoa. That's a crystal Tiffany egg. No, it's a crystal.
26:26 Pablo Torre? Waterford.
26:27 Speaker 04 Waterford egg.
26:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
26:29 Speaker 04 Of the Hindenburg squished together and it goes to the coach of the year.
26:36 Pablo Torre? Here is the coach's trophy, given to the winner of the BCS National Championship game, if you remember that, until 2013. The coach's trophy is what it says along the base in like impact font, which is kind of funny. Now that I think about Waterfordness versus the like.
26:55 Speaker 04 Right.
26:55 Pablo Torre? I printed this on Microsoft Word.
26:56 Speaker 04 Good point. Now you're doing it, Pablo. I'm not kidding. But go on.
27:02 Pablo Torre? It also, as we evaluate its crystalliness, it seemed like it may have inspired the object that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, recently offered the Pope on his recent trip to the Vatican. If we have.
27:20 Speaker 04 Shite. Absolute shite. And he's an American Pope and he can't even bel- that's what America offers the Pope.
27:32 Pablo Torre? What is he offering?
27:33 Speaker 04 He's offering a little.
27:36 Speaker 04 Thing that you put in your vagina, an egg that you stick up there. And I think you walk around all day with it in there.
27:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
27:46 Speaker 04 And it's glass football. It's a glass football about three inches long.
27:52 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
27:52 Speaker 04 Why? It says the State Department. That's why?
27:56 Pablo Torre? Yeah, this does look like one of those Jade Eggs. A yoni egg is what the.
28:00 Speaker 04 Yes, that, wow, you're good.
28:02 Pablo Torre? You got to strengthen the pelvic floor.
28:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good thing to be a healthy on.
28:07 Pablo Torre? Now that said, um, the Pope, I just can't reiterate his review enough, which was wow. Period. Okay. Period.
28:15 Speaker 04 It is wow, okay. That's what it is. God, I love our country.
28:21 Pablo Torre? We are, we are a magnificent creature.
28:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:24 Pablo Torre? That was the coaches trophy in college football when given to the winner of the previous championship game. And this is now what the national champion gets instead.
28:34 Speaker 04 I'm so sorry, uh, college national champions that they're giving you an absolutely generic idea of an abstract football, Super Bowl sculpture. It's sad. You work very hard and it doesn't look like much of anything. The base, it goes down to a little silver thing before it meets like a little marble base. It says national champion with. I'm really sorry. It, it has nothing to it, except gold.
29:13 Pablo Torre? Yeah, um, this is also the thing that, uh, J D Vance kind of dropped when he was delivering it to, uh, the national champions when they visited the White House. Uh, the base there was actually key to Ohio State's visit. He kind of let the base fall off the thing and it was.
29:30 Speaker 04 Wow.
29:31 Pablo Torre? Wasn't great, but this is 24 karat gold bronze and stainless steel. And the way I'm seeing it now, it does look like a football. And maybe this is almost like the, the, what, the contrails?
29:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:44 Pablo Torre? Like the things sort of like making those waves in the air behind it.
29:49 Speaker 04 A good call. It's an idea of someone else's idea of a trophy. And I'm sorry, they can do better. This was designed when? Do you have its date?
30:05 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
30:05 Speaker 04 Recently?
30:06 Pablo Torre? This was in the 20 teens.
30:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, it looks like that. It's like, eh, nobody's got an idea. Get that department to just make one, make it gold in a, in a football. And that's it. It's a, it's a shame. Sports is better than that.
30:22 Pablo Torre? The thing that makes me smile, though, when I think of the college football landscape is this.
30:28 Speaker 04 A pop? That's insane that there's a label that says Pop-Tarts on your trophy?
30:37 Pablo Torre? This is the Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy. You get it for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl.
30:42 Speaker 04 And where is, what is the Pop-Tarts Bowl?
30:45 Pablo Torre? I'm so glad you asked, Jerry Solz.
30:47 Speaker 04 What is it?
30:48 Pablo Torre? So college football culminates in a series of one-off games.
30:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:53 Pablo Torre? Not everybody can be in the college football playoff field. And so you play these one-off games and one of them is sponsored by Pop-Tarts.
31:01 Speaker 04 And where is it played?
31:02 Pablo Torre? This one was played in Orlando as is sort of like very tiny font along the bottom.
31:08 Speaker 04 Oh, you're right.
31:09 Pablo Torre? Pop-Tart with the bite taken out of it at the base.
31:12 Speaker 04 Well, here again, it's all derived, this works like artworks. It works from the Super Bowl trophy. From the tilted football that that guy had the idea for.
31:26 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
31:27 Speaker 04 And it keeps repeating, repeating, repeating. So so far in American sports, you have found the er trophy, which is the Super Bowl trophy. And that's what they're all taking off from.
31:45 Pablo Torre? Does this object gain anything in your estimation? By virtue of the fact that it's also a toaster? It, it's a functional toaster.
31:56 Speaker 04 Oh, my God. Now, that makes it like a Duchamp. It's like an assisted ready maid. That's a found sculpture Duchamp created.
32:10 Pablo Torre? Marcel Duchamp, of course.
32:12 Speaker 04 Yes, created the urinal. So this is a trophy that functions like a working toaster. So I could toast my Pop-Tart or toast in there every morning.
32:25 Pablo Torre? I don't know if it would accept toast, but the bricolage of you putting toast inside of a Pop-Tart trophy.
32:32 Speaker 04 That's cool.
32:33 Pablo Torre? I mean, that is, that's avant-garde.
32:35 Speaker 04 It's avant-garde and it's complete crapola of the highest order of idiocy, American kitsch, but, and it's shameless of Pop-Tarts. It's just shameless. They probably paid all of $4 million to get this naming rights thing. And it's ridiculous to sell your soul for something like this. But that's what we are in this country. And we love ourselves for it. And everybody gets a toaster.
33:08 Pablo Torre? I should say that according to our exhaustive fact checking process here, we have just discovered that the Pop-Tarts Bowl paid $2 million.
33:16 Speaker 04 Oh, Jesus. Stop it, stop it, American sports. You could, you could have sold.
33:23 Pablo Torre? We just gave you a 50% off deal, Jerry.
33:26 Speaker 04 Oh, Jesus, it's, I'm sorry. God, America. You sell yourself. You like trumpet. Go on.
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36:13 Pablo Torre? I wanna now use these white gloves for real tactile evaluation here because we have a real sculpture here, Jerry.
36:22 Speaker 04 Great.
36:22 Pablo Torre? And behind you, there is an object. And I would love it if we could, oh, we have the door opening. We're gonna bring in our docents.
36:35 Speaker 04 Hello, docent. Hello, hello.
36:37 Pablo Torre? Rob and Patrick, please.
36:38 Speaker 04 Hey, Rob and Patrick.
36:39 Pablo Torre? Please reveal what has been behind.
36:42 Speaker 04 I'm gonna turn all the way around.
36:43 Pablo Torre? Jerry Saltz, oh, they're bringing it over.
36:47 Speaker 04 Wow.
36:48 Pablo Torre? The truly iconic Heisman Memorial Trophy.
36:52 Speaker 04 The weight of history.
36:55 Pablo Torre? Jerry, you may touch the object.
36:57 Speaker 04 May I?
36:58 Pablo Torre? With the gloves, as a prophylactic, you may.
37:02 Speaker 04 What does it weigh?
37:04 Pablo Torre? It weighs 45 pounds.
37:06 Speaker 04 My God, I'll tell you, this is an American classic. It pictures someone running with a ball, presumably a running back. God, is this fantastic? The sheer weight, the sheer iron throne, power, magnificence of this again. It's like a robot, a tiny little doll, like just bam, it's just amazing. It's a running back, giving a stiff arm, holding the ball to his bosom and making a huge stride, exaggerated, but it's fantastic.
37:51 Speaker 04 It looks of pre-World War II is what it looks like. So this is an America that no longer exists of just barely with the equipment that we would recognize, no apparent jersey.
38:11 Speaker 04 You know, almost like the Olympians playing half naked. But whatever it is, it's it's it's just a powerful, heavy block of of American history.
38:24 Pablo Torre? Well, it does. Now that you mention it, it does have sort of the aspect of our own version of, uh, it was it was, uh, Discobulus by Myron, right? The guy with the the disc, the throwing disc.
38:36 Speaker 04 Oh, yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Good call.
38:39 Pablo Torre? Yes, there it is. It has it has.
38:40 Speaker 04 Genius. If I had said that, I'd leave today happy. But I didn't. So that is brilliant.
38:47 Pablo Torre? You know, the way this was made and you can, yeah, it's solid as you are.
38:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:52 Pablo Torre? As you are.
38:53 Speaker 04 God.
38:54 Pablo Torre? Feeling it. Um, the ancient method it used, uh, was lost wax casting.
39:02 Speaker 04 Yes.
39:03 Pablo Torre? Hot wax poured into a mold and then dipped into a liquid ceramic. It was called the investment, the liquid ceramic. Egyptians used this, apparently, uh, dates back to forty five, fifty B.C.
39:16 Speaker 04 It's just utterly archaic and ancient that way. It also feels like earlier American illustration.
39:25 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
39:26 Speaker 04 A la pre Norman Rockwell, but Americana.
39:31 Pablo Torre? Yes.
39:31 Speaker 04 So, uh, it's just a piece of America right in front of me.
39:37 Pablo Torre? John Heisman, the director of the Downtown Athletic Club, is what it's named after, summoning that, you know, again, Rockwellian.
39:44 Speaker 04 I never knew that.
39:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the Downtown Athletic Club here in in in New York City. And, uh, the guy who is the model for this is the friend of the sculptor. The sculptor's name is Frank L. S. Q. Apparently, he designed this when he was nineteen years old.
40:03 Speaker 04 Yes.
40:03 Pablo Torre? And his friend is a guy, was a guy, named Ed Smith, fullback, passer, runner and punter on the NYU football team. He was pictured here, Jerry, as you can see.
40:13 Speaker 04 What a face. What what a mug. What a great mug.
40:18 Pablo Torre? I do wanna bring another image to the table here, though. Because what is not in this box, just to be. Be clear about what we're not gonna show you is this. And I do really want you to evaluate this. Because this trophy, it's the Borg Warner Trophy. And can you describe what is at the base of this?
40:42 Speaker 04 Well, those are the kings on the base. Little tiny portraits of each winner of said race. What race is it?
40:56 Pablo Torre? This would be the Indianapolis 500.
40:58 Speaker 04 Well, that's incredible. You want, if possible, to have your face or name engraved or sculpted onto an object to make you part of its history. Because that is part, it can be part of what a trophy is, where you attach your spirit to the spirit of the winning of that trophy. And because, I mean, car racing is a great sport. I love F1. I don't like.
41:33 Pablo Torre? Indy car.
41:34 Speaker 04 At all, because they only go around in a circle. But I have nothing against it. And that's a kind of an amazing sculpture.
41:43 Pablo Torre? All the names of all the winners are right there next to the tiny lil bus.
41:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:49 Pablo Torre? And this, I mean, you talked about before. Will no one think of the base? This is essential.
41:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. Every part of this sculpture is part of it. The whole base, holding a great Greco urn, filled with the ashes of the great, burning and abstract stylized flame. But it's just, and look how enormous it is. It's taller than the vehicle that won the race. It's tremendous.
42:28 Pablo Torre? More than five feet tall. And it keeps on growing to accommodate more bases and more faces on said bases. To give it that almost like Stanley Cup dynamic in hockey. That's the sort of like accumulated history manifesting.
42:43 Speaker 04 Great. That is a great idea. Wouldn't you want to have your name on that thing?
42:49 Pablo Torre? I think, I think every. Art and Journalism Award should also have this.
42:55 Speaker 04 That's a genius idea.
42:57 Pablo Torre? There is a veiled piece of hardware that I now feel comfortable bringing to this desk. And it is the one behind me, and so into the museum here, return our docents. And now, what do we have here?
43:19 Speaker 04 The James Mortimer Memorial Cup. For what sport is it?
43:27 Pablo Torre? Well, Jerry.
43:28 Speaker 04 Couldn't read it.
43:29 Pablo Torre? I think it's best if we play this clip.
43:33 Speaker 05 The Best in Show winner at the 148th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is the miniature poodle.
43:43 Speaker 04 I have to say, when America was founded in the 1700s, 1800s, our design style was Greek revival. All of our cemeteries have either Egyptian obelisks in them or urns, Greek temples if you're buried that way. A lot of our homes are designed that way. And so it comes as no surprise, does it? That we haven't moved on from that? What is the definition of trophy? It is not urn. What is an urn?
44:26 Speaker 04 It is a place to put ashes. So yes, there's an immemorial aspect to all of these great cups. But it again feels terribly American to me.
44:42 Pablo Torre? Yeah, 150 years is what the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, how long they've been at it. So this is the second longest running sporting competition in America after the Kentucky Derby. This is American.
44:57 Speaker 04 Yes.
44:58 Pablo Torre? And the video we saw was, of course, Sage, the miniature poodle from 2024.
45:05 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
45:06 Pablo Torre? Previous winners also include Wasabi, the Pekingese.
45:10 Speaker 04 Whoa. Hate.
45:13 Pablo Torre? Hate the dog.
45:14 Speaker 04 Well, I love the dog, but I hate the dog.
45:17 Pablo Torre? Because of the haircut?
45:18 Speaker 04 Well, I'd like to see a dachshund win.
45:20 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
45:21 Speaker 04 But they're never gonna win.
45:23 Pablo Torre? Well, there is a certain hierarchy, of course, a caste system.
45:27 Speaker 04 Are you a dog person?
45:29 Pablo Torre? I grew up in the city and I never had a dog.
45:31 Speaker 04 Nor did I. No, no.
45:33 Pablo Torre? I do dig the sort of like, I don't know, it looks like a Star Wars character, kind of.
45:38 Speaker 04 Good point.
45:38 Pablo Torre? Kind of like that.
45:39 Speaker 04 Good point.
45:40 Pablo Torre? And we have one more.
45:41 Speaker 04 Okay.
45:42 Pablo Torre? Trumpet, the bloodhound.
45:44 Speaker 04 Oh, come on. Trumpet, you've got Dumbo ears. You're beautiful.
45:50 Pablo Torre? Twenty twenty-two.
45:51 Speaker 04 Love you madly.
45:52 Pablo Torre? This is a one of one trophy.
45:55 Speaker 04 So I get to keep this?
45:57 Pablo Torre? Well, if you, Jerry Saltz, can defeat a variety of best in show worthy dogs, you might be able to get this.
46:08 Speaker 04 For one year or forever?
46:10 Pablo Torre? Well, this is the rule. So the trophy stays at the headquarters of the Westminster Kennel Club here in New York City, not with the winner.
46:18 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
46:19 Pablo Torre? And it stays in perpetuity unless it is visiting our podcast, or the best in show winner wins five times and is American bred.
46:30 Speaker 04 And you get to keep it then?
46:31 Pablo Torre? Which has never happened.
46:32 Speaker 04 No, it's never gonna happen.
46:35 Pablo Torre? That is the bar you gotta clear. It's sort of an echo of like that World Cup original design where it's like, hey, if you win it three times, you can keep it. The Brazilians got it, of course, got it stolen.
46:45 Speaker 04 They changed it and yeah.
46:47 Pablo Torre? But this, no one has met that standard. And of course, the president of the Kennel Club, a gentleman by the name of Don Sturs, told us, yeah, he thinks it's never gonna happen.
46:57 Speaker 04 Never gonna happen.
47:12 Pablo Torre? The last object here, well, I suppose I should ask you because under this large, black cloak, this veil, is, and I will give you this clue, not the Stanley Cup.
47:26 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
47:26 Pablo Torre? Unfortunately, because the Stanley Cup and the keeper of the cup, who accompanies him. Been there, done that, you know about that thing.
47:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, wow.
47:33 Pablo Torre? We have our own guardian of this mystery box, who is here by law.
47:38 Speaker 04 Okay.
47:39 Pablo Torre? And I do want to explain that we are not allowed to touch the trophy inside this box.
47:47 Speaker 04 Okay.
47:48 Pablo Torre? And the guardian of said mystery box has been just outside the studio this entire time.
47:54 Speaker 04 Wow.
47:54 Pablo Torre? Watching us, perhaps cringing.
47:56 Speaker 04 I'm sure.
47:58 Pablo Torre? Perhaps growing aroused at times, depending on the resonance of our descriptions.
48:02 Speaker 04 Doubtful.
48:03 Pablo Torre? But I do believe it is now time to take the Westminster Kennel Trophy away and replace it with a clear sightline to what is underneath this. Georgia, please do us the honors of revealing what's underneath.
48:24 Speaker 04 It's a giant Louis Vuitton
48:29 Speaker 04 coffin-scale suitcase. Package.
48:35 Pablo Torre? A big red V across the front, many sort of like golden buckles, the inimitable and very, I am told, valuable print of Louis Vuitton all over this thing. It is a trunk.
48:50 Speaker 04 Okay.
48:51 Pablo Torre? A very large trunk, Jerry, and
48:53 Speaker 04 I'm into it.
48:55 Pablo Torre? Can we reveal what's inside the very large trunk? The top has been popped.
49:09 Speaker 04 A hookah? No, what? It's a gigantic, it's a, it's like a four-foot-tall chess piece, hookah, fountain, thing.
49:27 Pablo Torre? So this giant, I mean, trophy, it's affectionately known as the Ald mug. It was crafted in 1848.
49:36 Speaker 04 Wow.
49:38 Pablo Torre? By a master silversmith by the name of Edmund Cotrell. This is a style, Jerry, I don't know if you're familiar with it, neo-mannerist.
49:45 Speaker 04 Was it made in Europe?
49:48 Pablo Torre? It was, in fact, made in London.
49:50 Speaker 04 Year of Revolution, 1848.
49:54 Pablo Torre? Could you just describe the shape as we sort of go, if you could look up and down?
49:58 Speaker 04 The shape on the top looks like a little syrup, uh, pourer thing.
50:04 Pablo Torre? A gravy boat of sorts.
50:05 Speaker 04 A gravy boat perched atop a candlestick, perched atop a tuffet, perched atop, uh, you know, a two-tiered bell-shaped base. And the whole thing is, got writing on it of a lot of etched words.
50:27 Pablo Torre? I should say that the people who have been allowed to touch slash hold this figure include billionaires such as Richard Branson and Larry Ellison.
50:37 Speaker 04 It's not for smoking. I thought it might be a cigar smoker's.
50:43 Pablo Torre? I do love the idea of putting in one of those like coals at the top and like smoking this thing on a sidewalk.
50:51 Speaker 04 Did they, what did they do? Branson was in the, in the air ballooning. That's a ballooners sculpture, right?
51:02 Pablo Torre? You are getting both warmer and colder at the same time.
51:06 Speaker 04 Uh, clue.
51:08 Pablo Torre? Water.
51:10 Speaker 04 Water sailing.
51:12 Pablo Torre? You are looking, Jerry Saltz, at the America's Cup trophy. The America's Cup, of course, is called the America's Cup because the first race in 1851 was won by a boat named America, as raced by the New York Yacht Club. And so, it's a very New York, a New York institution in its history.
51:34 Speaker 04 Wow.
51:36 Speaker 04 I never knew. I had no idea. Congratulations, all you sailors. I mean, what can I say?
51:46 Pablo Torre? You could say that if you were to look closer, and you can look closer, you will notice that there are spelling errors everywhere. The fonts are different everywhere. This is according to the official historian, Magnus Wheatley, because what a name for the official historian of the America's Cup. According to legend, nothing fair about winning this. This is the hardest trophy in international sport to win, because when you win the America's Cup, you basically get to decide where they'll race, what sort of boats they'll be racing with. You kind of get this all-powerful ability to dictate the race itself.
52:25 Speaker 04 So if I win it this year, I can say, "Next year, we're gonna go in figure eights."
52:32 Pablo Torre? In the East River.
52:32 Speaker 04 In the East River, because that's my best shot at winning.
52:37 Pablo Torre? I would like Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, to gaze at this. And the utter generosity of Georgia aside.
52:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:49 Pablo Torre? I would like you to do what you do and tell us what artistically you are looking at.
52:56 Speaker 04 Well, this is a combination, like you called it neo-mannerist. Mannerism was a movement after the Renaissance, where every artist thought, "How am I gonna do something different than the 'er' object of Michelangelo?" So they started making figures do this and posing strange. A mannerist tendency means to take an 'er' object and sort of pull it apart, twist it around, add something to it, throw in a different culture. And that is sort of what this is.
53:38 Pablo Torre? It has like, almost like a fencing sort of epay handle.
53:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:44 Pablo Torre? Over there.
53:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:45 Pablo Torre? And then like a genie's gravy boat at the top.
53:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:49 Pablo Torre? And it has, I mean, you said it was a... Was it a muffet or a tuffet?
53:53 Speaker 04 No one knows, but it's like a muffin top on the top.
53:58 Pablo Torre? Correct.
53:59 Speaker 04 Um, it's like a bust, a girdle.
54:02 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
54:02 Speaker 04 A corset. Uh, it's just a lot of things. Does it work as one? Think again of it as a chess piece.
54:13 Pablo Torre? Kind of does feel like every chess piece combined into one chess.
54:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's what it does. That's it.
54:18 Pablo Torre? It kind of feels like the chess piece that says, I'm buying all of the other chess pieces.
54:23 Speaker 04 Is it the best trophy? It is, it is not the best trophy, but it does appear to be the biggest trophy. You'd think they could like pick up on Tibetan, like Lore, or like South American, or Aboriginal. I don't know.
54:44 Pablo Torre? I think.
54:44 Speaker 04 It's colonist. It's colonizing. The trophies are all colonized.
54:50 Pablo Torre? Yes, they've colonized.
54:53 Speaker 04 Themselves.
54:54 Pablo Torre? And us.
54:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
54:56 Pablo Torre? Our expectations for what it looks like to be a winner.
54:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's true.
55:00 Pablo Torre? And what is more winner-like than having a kind human being named Georgia? Who we've conned into opening a Louis Vuitton trunk, inside of which is the greatest hookah the world has ever seen.
55:18 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Thank you.
55:21 Pablo Torre? You're welcome. Thank you, Georgia. You're welcome. Jerry, I'm gonna let you keep that butt plug.
55:28 Speaker 04 Is that true?
55:30 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
55:30 Speaker 04 I get to take this home?
55:32 Pablo Torre? I mean.
55:33 Speaker 04 I love this.
55:33 Pablo Torre? I can't co-sign exactly what you're gonna do with it, but we are a country of freedom.
55:39 Speaker 04 This, I get to keep this?
55:41 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
55:46 Pablo Torre? We brought you the [bleep] America's Cup, Jerry, and you're obsessed with that.
55:52 Speaker 04 I won.
56:03 Pablo Torre? Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Max. Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tummenello. Studio engineering by RG Systems. Sound design by Andrew Bersick. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. Theme song, as always, by John Bravo.
56:25 Pablo Torre? And we'll talk to you next time.
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