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

Not since the Greco-Roman period has sculpture mattered this much in sports. And Jerry Saltz — the Pulitzer Prize-winning senior art critic for New York magazine — has zero idea who Dwyane Wade is. Which is precisely why we asked the erstwhile Jewish Cowboy (we'll explain) to evaluate our athletic Bronze Age, from Michael Jordan to Cristiano Ronaldo. And that's before we get to "I Can't Believe It's Not Pablo (Butter on Gasbag, 2024)." Plus: the conscious uncoupling of art and money, sex workers in Jacksonville, how to make an enemy of envy, and why you can't be a vampire alone. (This episode originally aired December 3, 2024.) • Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and invites https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:58Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so hello, it is me Pablo, entering, invading even your ears because I have done something I have not done before, 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. And so, I am. 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? It's free, and that's still there for you, and it's worth it.

• 2:43Pablo Torre?

  But the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool, personalized benefits to come. We will make it worth your while. We are figuring out, here at PTFO, our post-draft king's future. And, you know, more good news on that front, I hope, to come. 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. And this, this episode today, is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

• 3:24Pablo Torre?

  I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  That is an absolute [BLEEP] work of art, because it looks like a little mini statue on a idiotic store-bought trophy. It's crap!

• 3:43Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  I only know how to use Instagram because a student signed me up, and I lost my password, 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, I'm unable to do it.

• 4:08Pablo Torre?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Are we rolling, Chris?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  You want all of this?

• 4:12Pablo Torre?

  Unfortunately...

• 4:14Speaker 04

  We'll start again when you're ready.

• 4:16Pablo Torre?

  We've started, if that's okay with you. 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?

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you know yours?

• 4:29Pablo Torre?

  I do.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  What is it?

• 4:31Pablo Torre?

  Well, we're gonna...

• 4:32Speaker 04

  But is it like...

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  I would tell you, but it's my password to everything, and it is very hackable.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  And it's like an old address?

• 4:38Pablo Torre?

  It's a thing that's very dear to me. I'm like talking to a mentalist, I feel like. It's very dear to me. It's a childhood residence.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Got it. Got it. I know what it is. It's okay.

• 4:48Pablo Torre?

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

• 5:10Pablo Torre?

  For people who don't know Jerry Saltz, by the way, thank you so much for being here.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:21Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, well, this is the ideal audience for me for this specific episode, I think. Because I know of you as, of course, the guy who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:32Pablo Torre?

  I am a magazine nerd, a journalism practitioner, but also acolyte in an era where that's intimidating.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're the last of our kind. All these magazines, The New Yorker, New York. 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.

• 5:58Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. How long away are we from that?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Uh, 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. Uh, we hate them.

• 6:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  And screw them.

• 6:16Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah. Are you a sports fan?

• 6:18Speaker 04

  I, uh, I'm a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants.

• 6:27Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  And, uh, that's it. I, and I'm a huge F1 nerd since the TV show and the pre-pandemic and all of that.

• 6:37Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait a minute. So Yankees wise, um, I, I am, uh, here to report that I was at game five of the World Series.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 6:45Pablo Torre?

  And, uh, that felt like, uh, a grotesque, uh, performance art at a certain point.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:52Pablo Torre?

  The fifth inning, just the worst inning in baseball history, arguably just so many self-inflicted wounds.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. I don't know what to say. I'm a fair weather fan. I used to go, uh, we're boring your audience. Let's move on.

• 7:06Pablo Torre?

  I want to get to though, the idea that you as an authority on art and art criticism are also somebody who is online. The reason I started with your password is because you're also somebody with a giant, a legitimately thriving community around your online presence. How do you describe your relationship with social media?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Follow me at Jerry Salts. 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, uh, the Twitter or the Facebook, or no, I can get on, I can't get on Facebook.

• 7:45Pablo Torre?

  You were banned from Facebook at one point.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Right. I had over a half million followers. I have like six or 700,000 now.

• 7:55Pablo Torre?

  But who's counting?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  But I am because it's all I have.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  The Pulitzer Prize for criticism and about, you know, three quarters of a million people. 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, painting shows, sculpture shows at museums, galleries, alternative spaces in New York. And then I go home and I become terrified that I have to write about these. I've not gone out to dinner with anybody in decades

• 8:41Speaker 04

  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. Oh, yeah. And I would say, no, you are. The wig is large. And I would say, what art shows have you seen? And you would say, I haven't seen anything. Yeah. 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 big wig, by the way. A true big wig. She is the real deal. If you want to read art criticism, read Roberta

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Smith. I'm sorry, I'm such a slow talker, but I'm from the Midwest. 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. 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, I was posting a lot of medieval manuscripts, which had been

• 9:59Speaker 04

  digitalized and rediscovered and were being seen for the first time. A lot of these are very violent, are the ones I would post. And I would post like a woman having her breasts 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. And it turned out that I was not violating any rules of the community. I got a lot of correspondence from Facebook. They said thousands of people from the art world protested.

• 10:44Pablo Torre?

  I mean, what you're describing is stuff that might be found in museums, right?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  It's great art.

• 10:49Pablo Torre?

  This is like high art.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Great art, but with my unfortunate commentary seemed, and this was just after Trump won. 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. Men know [BLEEP] nothing about anything. We barely have an inner life.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  We think about seeing women naked. This is a straight man. We think about seeing a woman naked. We think about abstract problems like, will there be time travel? And we think about traffic. Other than that.

• 11:50Pablo Torre?

  Cross out my will there be time travel question.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, see?

• 11:58Pablo Torre?

  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. A statue. A statue which, as you may have been reminded recently, in the case of, say, Dwyane Wade, is not always as popular as the person it seeks to honor. And so I wanted Jerry and his Pulitzer and his three honorary doctorates and his decades

• 12:36Pablo Torre?

  of criticism to basically serve as PTFO's unbiased and completely overqualified art critic, as you'll see in a bit here. But first, I think you need to understand the origin of his truly incomparable point of view.

• 12:55Pablo Torre?

  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?

• 13:05Speaker 04

  I graduated at the bottom of my enormous high school class. 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. 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. They didn't care about me. It was all fine. I became an artist. I never went to school.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Anybody listening to this, I am a much bigger loser than even you. I have no degrees, never went to school. I really don't know anything. I became an artist. I moved to New York when I was 27. 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. I mean, you're pulling the wool over everybody's eyes. You have a bad neck," or whatever it is.

• 14:23Pablo Torre?

  That is so far all true.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  All those things I listened to. And I self-exiled 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. I would drive from New York to Florida or to Texas, occasionally to California.

• 14:47Pablo Torre?

  Did you have a handle, like the CB?

• 14:49Speaker 04

  It was the Jewish Cowboy. And I would get on the CB and I would go, "Shalom, partner. Let's talk about the late work of Richard Sarah." And none of them ever spoke to me. Either I'm a slow talker, or they just recognized a rube.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  I did this for 10 years.

• 15:12Pablo Torre?

  Man.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  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? 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 another one. As you can see, I don't put off the vibe. I don't have the sex vibe. You're good looking. People look at you and they want you. I'm old and short and bald and wear glasses.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  You don't know what it was like.

• 16:00Pablo Torre?

  And yet, in that story, that deeply bleak story that happened to you in Jacksonville, Florida, there is a lesson for me.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  What?

• 16:07Pablo Torre?

  By the end of this episode, I will determine exactly what I should take away as a lesson from your streak of prostitutelessness.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, nothing. 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. Now, at that point, I had never written a word in my life. I didn't read. I did nothing. 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.

• 16:49Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  No. So, I became an art critic and I started writing absolute bull****. 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.

• 17:11Pablo Torre?

  Interrogates a great art critic word, by the way.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  And which you should never use. Anyway, so I started writing that way and slowly.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  I found my own voice. And at forty-one, I began working. So, all of you listening to this, you haven't even begun yet. Get your acts together, you big babies. It's hard. No one said it's gonna be easy. 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. Every night, you have to sacrifice it all. You have to meet other people like yourself. You can't be a vampire alone.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  You have to have a coven, or whatever those things are called. And have each other to... Otherwise, you think you know things other people don't know, and that's unlikely. You know nothing. And you just need to hang out, get to work, and work in your own voice. You have to make an enemy of envy. You cannot look out and have your eyes scanning the world and always be comparing yourself to others.

• 18:41Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I wanna, I wanna actually jump in on that because, as an artist yourself, I do wanna 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. You were in museums. You were reviewed in art forum. You were in galleries.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:00Pablo Torre?

  So, I wanna 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.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Well, I had 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. I was going to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy, all one hundred cantos, or chapters. I was going to do one hundred works on each of the one hundred cantos. And it would be a 25 year project. I know, I'm nuts. It would be a 25 year project.

• 19:41Pablo Torre?

  That's incredible.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  It began two days before Easter 1975, before everybody here was born. It was supposed to end on Easter the year 2000. Okay, that's.

• 19:58Pablo Torre?

  Ambition is a word that comes to mind.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and 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?

• 20:10Pablo Torre?

  I am 39 years old.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Already. You think I'm over the hill, I'm washed up.

• 20:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, my neck actually does hurt.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, mine hurts and I have aches and pains. Nothing will protect you. 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. You created your situation, not all of their success. So make an enemy of envy.

• 20:52Pablo Torre?

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• 22:27Pablo Torre?

  Your view that to love art is to criticize it rigorously.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:35Pablo Torre?

  Do you feel like that is the default in your profession? How has that sort of maybe evolved itself over time?

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Anybody listening to this podcast will understand this. 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, love 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. 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.

• 23:23Speaker 04

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

• 23:42Speaker 04

  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. Where are all the Asian artists in Western art history? There aren't any because we didn't believe it was possible. I imagine sports is going through something similar, but on a corporate level as it becomes more and more and more monetized.

• 24:14Pablo Torre?

  Oh, sure. Sure, sure, sure. 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.

• 24:24Speaker 04

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

• 24:46Pablo Torre?

  That's right.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  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. 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. 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.

• 25:28Speaker 04

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

• 25:33Pablo Torre?

  Hmm. 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 Jerry, you famously, I'm not overstating this, you critiqued a presidential portrait of Barack Obama.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:55Pablo Torre?

  By Ghislaine Wiley.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:56Pablo Torre?

  Very famous artist himself.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  I said it was [BLEEP]. I said it was [BLEEP] because, listen, I loved the Amy Sherald portrait of Michelle Obama, mind you. So these two paintings were presented at the same time. Cahinde Wiley's painting is [BLEEP] because it's photo realism. Good for photo realism. It projects an image. You get a picture, you project it, you paint it perfect. You send it to China, they can do it. Cahinde has his studio fill in a cuckoo background and sets Barack on an African chair.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  I guess that's his contribution. And as a painting, it is completely unoriginal. As an image of Obama, it's unlike every other presidential portrait ever made. So it depends how I judge it as a thing, not as what the artist says it is. 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. When you read Dante, you are reading yourself into

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyonce, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherald.

• 27:34Pablo Torre?

  The Cahinde Wiley portrait for just those who did not-

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Do you like it?

• 27:38Pablo Torre?

  Well, so here's the thing that-

• 27:40Speaker 04

  It's realistic.

• 27:42Pablo Torre?

  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 an ornate regal aspect to the background, to the vellages, 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. Like, this is cool.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Good.

• 28:09Pablo Torre?

  And then, I guess my issue is, in retrospect, is my evolution in taste happened, is that he just kept on doing it

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:19Pablo Torre?

  again and again and again, and it became formulaic, admittedly.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:24Pablo Torre?

  And it sort of felt like he had one idea and he managed to execute it a zillion times.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Bingo. And you know what? There are a lot of artists like that. There's, I can tell you their names if you want to go. 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. 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. And he can't do it. And other artists do.

• 29:22Speaker 05

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• 30:52Pablo Torre?

  Do you know who Dwyane Wade is?

• 30:55Speaker 04

  I do not know. Who is Dwyane Wade?

• 30:58Pablo Torre?

  This is perfect.

• 31:02Speaker 09

  Tonight, there's a mystery brewing in South Florida. I can't believe that. Who is that guy? It's supposed to be a statue of the man asking that question. Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade. But the internet is not quite so sure.

• 31:16Speaker 10

  That is not D Wade. That's Shannon Sharpe, The Rock. Like, who is that?

• 31:20Speaker 09

  Outside the Heat home arena Sunday, the team unveiled this new tribute to the man known as D Wade. 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. A figure in a Heat jersey on top of the scorer's table? Some will tell you that's gotta be Dwyane Wade. With eight, 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.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  So that's Dwyane Wade. Great, great athlete.

• 31:53Pablo Torre?

  Yes, Dwyane Wade is maybe the greatest player in Miami Heat history. He is the guy posing as such. Fist-balled, mouth open.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:06Pablo Torre?

  Ferocious.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:07Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:18Pablo Torre?

  And the first response that everybody has is, "That [bleep] doesn't look like Dwyane Wade."

• 32:25Speaker 04

  That's true. It doesn't look anything like him. What I'll say is, that is an absolute [bleep]. Work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on a idiotic store bought trophy and it's just got it. 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. It has no ambiance. It has no internal scale. It has no feel for

• 33:05Speaker 04

  its material. It found a photograph, scanned it most likely or some and reproduced it. It's crap.

• 33:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  How much did they pay for it? A hundred dollars, 200?

• 33:20Pablo Torre?

  We don't know exactly what was paid, Jerry.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Do you like it?

• 33:26Pablo Torre?

  I, I, I don't.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  It's

• 33:28Pablo Torre?

  But I also want to point out when it comes to resemblance.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:33Pablo Torre?

  Okay. How important is it for the statue of somebody to be actually a photo realistic depiction of them in real life?

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Well, it's not that important to me. I can see that it could be important to people who worship that person. But I would remind all of those worshippers and fans that all the different pictures of Jesus that they've seen are equally realistic and equal fictions that they're idealized or de-idealized, or maybe you like Francis Bacon's exploding Jesus. Maybe that speaks to you. What this says is I wanted to be a realist sculptor

• 34:24Speaker 04

  and I found a photograph and I made it without paying much attention to it at all.

• 34:30Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Other than the, the signature pose.

• 34:35Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  So in the next generation, we'll look at that sculpture and see metal.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:51Pablo Torre?

  Right, the bronze.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  That's all they're gonna see, I promise you. It looks like a lot of 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, I would pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard, at best. There's nothing wrong with that, that's fun.

• 35:20Pablo Torre?

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

• 35:28Speaker 04

  I'd love to hear it.

• 35:29Speaker 09

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

• 35:46Speaker 11

  He approved it on the site, he approved it in the photos, and he approved himself. And if somebody else doesn't approve him, he can go to Dwayne himself.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Of course he did, okay.

• 35:59Pablo Torre?

  So that's Omri Amrani, I should say, the co-sculptor, I guess, they have some sort of, you know.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  It 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, they're scammers, they don't know it. Listen.

• 36:24Pablo Torre?

  I feel about to say allegedly, I guess, in there somewhere, but I don't want to step on your critique.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  They're, 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, I didn't take that away from them, I don't think it looks like anybody.

• 36:52Pablo Torre?

  It doesn't look like Dwyane Wade at all.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  No, and that's fine, Dwayne Reed liked it and he's cool with it.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  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 That happens as well. So this is a happy medium between thinking and non-thinking that looks like a photograph in three dimensions.

• 37:26Pablo Torre?

  What do you think of this sculpture? Are you familiar with this work?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Is that Rocky?

• 37:32Pablo Torre?

  This is the, this is the Rocky statue?

• 37:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 37:45Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 37:46Pablo Torre?

  Discus throwers and...

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. This, as much as I love the first Rocky movie...

• 37:53Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I mean, by the way, the kids out there should know, this was an Oscar-worthy...

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:58Pablo Torre?

  Screenplay, performance, all of it. Actually good.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, watch it, you know, it has a happy ending, whatever. But the point is, as a work of art, it only goes to the Wade Johnson place. You could put the name Wade Johnson on this, it would be the same. The pose has...

• 38:18Pablo Torre?

  Oh, the Dwyane Wade, you mean?

• 38:19Speaker 04

  The Dwyane Wade.

• 38:20Pablo Torre?

  I love that you have no idea who Dwyane Wade is. I mean that so sincerely.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  I'm sorry.

• 38:24Pablo Torre?

  You're the, you're the most pure sample that we could have for this exercise, so I love it.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  So, this is another... Is that you? No, that's Sylvester Stallone. He's as tall as I am. I love him. He's a big Trump guy, but he, he's done good work. And you know what?

• 38:45Pablo Torre?

  That's true, all of that's true.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  It's fine. You know, Dwayne Reed and, and that guy, he, they contributed a lot to the culture.

• 38:55Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  They should get statues of themselves.

• 38:58Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  You should. I just hope that yours will be better.

• 39:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. I would, I would like to submit...

• 39:06Speaker 04

  More, let's see more.

• 39:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, can we, can we get Michael Jordan on the screen, please?

• 39:10Speaker 04

  The greatest of all.

• 39:12Pablo Torre?

  So this is how they commemorated the greatest, his airness, outside of the United Center where the Chicago Bulls...

• 39:18Speaker 04

  I love the figure underneath him. Can I see the, the close-up of the humunculus beneath him?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 39:28Pablo Torre?

  There is a humunculus aspect to the person he is dunking over.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  That the the figure underneath Michael is great. And he's got an extra face. His face has fallen off. His like an arm with like 70 figure. I don't I mean, here's what's great. The pose of this and the juxtaposition of the super realist. This is better for one reason. The idea of the Baroque means the Baroque back in the 1600s was the invention of movies, of the cinematic, dramatic, melodramatic, motion, action, action. This is an action shot.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  This is a frozen moment in time. The basketball is just on Michael's fingertips.

• 40:22Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  His left hand is giving himself balance. His feet are spread out for maximum height and balance. The person underneath him becomes meaningless.

• 40:33Pablo Torre?

  Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped over.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  It's you. That's mortal reality, immortal reality. Uh, again, the realism is what it is. That's not bad. He's like his hair under his arm. He's uh, his his lip is being clenched. He's like staring at the target. There's stuff going on there.

• 40:58Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Who made that one?

• 40:59Pablo Torre?

  So this was one of the two guys that made the Dwyane Wade sculpt.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  He his older work is better.

• 41:06Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:08Pablo Torre?

  I agree. This is this is an amazing statue.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:11Pablo Torre?

  That I can imagine, uh, Dwyane 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 before.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  And that's what makes you a great commentator and podcaster. You understand the quality has been determined in this case by the market picking something the market already picked.

• 41:35Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Okay? And you're getting that self reiterative.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Smoothing out and deadening that that will do.

• 41:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Can we just show you Brandy Chastain for a second?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  Who's that?

• 41:50Pablo Torre?

  Because Brandy Chastain, all time American women's soccer player, and this is her Hall of Fame plaque, the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, and this is her in real life.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  What's the sport that Brandy?

• 42:00Pablo Torre?

  Soccer.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  I would call it a travesty of mimosis, meaning it doesn't look anything mimetic art.

• 42:10Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde, and made her into Gertrude Stein.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  And for that, that's kind of interesting, or, you know, like a Russian policewoman, but...

• 42:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so Eleanor Roosevelt, perhaps?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, but if I were Brandy, I might be a little miffed, but, you know, I don't think athletes even think that way.

• 42:41Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, her view was, I think, to your point, quote, "It's not the most flattering, but it's nice."

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's not untrue.

• 42:49Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  It's good to be remembered.

• 42:51Pablo Torre?

  Right, not great is that she also looks like Gary Busey, I guess.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  God, yes, that's the grimace. I don't know where the grimace came from.

• 43:00Pablo Torre?

  The, 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 Buseyian.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, you got it. It's a picture of Gary Busey. They could change it out.

• 43:14Pablo Torre?

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

• 43:22Speaker 04

  I do know him.

• 43:23Pablo Torre?

  Oh, okay.

• 43:23Speaker 04

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

• 43:28Pablo Torre?

  So, so this is Ronaldo.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  That could be a great piece of folk art. That is a great piece of [bleep] up, super crazy, manneristic, meaning the neck is about a foot and a half long. The hair is standing up and out. The face is completely crooked. The eyes are asymmetrical.

• 43:52Pablo Torre?

  The eyes are doing a lot here.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  He's looking at with sheer madness.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  I'd love to meet that artist. I mean, that is wild.

• 44:01Pablo Torre?

  The artist's name is Emmanuel Santos.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  That's the artist?

• 44:04Pablo Torre?

  That is Ronaldo.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:06Pablo Torre?

  That is Cristiano Ronaldo. So, by the way, does this statue look more like the artist who made it? Or Cristiano Ronaldo? Fame is one of the most angular, beautiful, symmetrical faces in human history. Your mileage may vary.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  That's well said. I think if we saw the picture of the artist, we don't know. But that is one great sculpture.

• 44:26Pablo Torre?

  Whoa. So you love this one?

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo. That's fine.

• 44:32Pablo Torre?

  But in a vacuum, you love this specific work.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 44:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  That's mad [BLEEP].

• 44:47Pablo Torre?

  There's one more thing we'd like you to evaluate.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:50Pablo Torre?

  If you can hold.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:52Pablo Torre?

  Until after the break.

• 45:07Pablo Torre?

  Jerry, you've stuck around very generously, and we brought in Sophie from the other side of the glass.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Love it.

• 45:13Pablo Torre?

  Because this is an original work that I have not seen. So we'll be viewing this for the first time together, genuinely.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:21Pablo Torre?

  Not a bit. I have not seen this.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  I'll let you react to it first.

• 45:24Pablo Torre?

  Okay. I want to give some identifying information. This is by Jim Victor and Marie Pelton, a couple from Pennsylvania. Their chosen medium is butter.

• 45:38Pablo Torre?

  And Sophie, will you unveil?

• 45:40Speaker 11

  Absolutely.

• 45:41Pablo Torre?

  The sculpture.

• 45:44Pablo Torre?

  Very delicately from the... I mean...

• 45:53Speaker 04

  What do you think?

• 45:54Pablo Torre?

  I-

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Is facing him now. I know what I think.

• 45:58Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if I've ever felt the feeling that I'm feeling right now.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face?

• 46:06Pablo Torre?

  It's hard not to think that this person is, uh... More handsome than me.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:17Pablo Torre?

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

• 46:26Speaker 04

  Wow. Um- It's larger than life size, slightly larger.

• 46:32Pablo Torre?

  It's really impressive. It's I... The, the, the texturing of my hair?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:39Pablo Torre?

  I wanna 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. There is a bit of a... I'm smizing, I think?

• 46:50Speaker 04

  I gotta come around.

• 46:51Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, let's rotate, let's rotate the microphone for, uh-

• 46:53Speaker 04

  How do I get this over there?

• 46:55Pablo Torre?

  I think you can just rotate it this way.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Alright, I'm coming around.

• 46:58Pablo Torre?

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

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Wow. See, I thought you looked like JFK. Here, touch it.

• 47:11Pablo Torre?

  It's so-

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Touch the sculpture, touch it.

• 47:13Pablo Torre?

  Jerry and I are touching it, and it's, and it's legitimately-

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:18Pablo Torre?

  Dairy.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  It's butter.

• 47:19Pablo Torre?

  It's legit dairy.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  It's Naples yellow butter. You have a great open collar, a t-shirt.

• 47:28Pablo Torre?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Do you have a mustache?

• 47:30Pablo Torre?

  I do, in, in this, I have what I aspire. I, I have the mustache of my dreams. Uh, uh, butter me has the facial hair I desire. They were generous with, uh, a, a healthy, a healthy serving above my upper lip.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  You, you look like a statesman, actually.

• 47:50Pablo Torre?

  I do!

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:52Pablo Torre?

  I look like I am, uh, more in charge than I feel day to day. Have you ever evaluated a butter sculpture before?

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture, being from the Midwest.

• 48:04Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's right.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have, um, in Wisconsin, there's a whole tradition of it. I'm mad for it. I also looked at ice sculptures. A corn sculpture is a big favorite of mine. This is just lovely. I think it's just lovely. I want to touch it a lot. I'm gonna touch it a little.

• 48:30Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, if you were.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Put his head next to it. Let me get my phone and take its picture.

• 48:35Pablo Torre?

  Jerry's going to take a photo of this.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  And I'll make you famous or something like that.

• 48:41Pablo Torre?

  I'm staring at myself in the glass.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  You are. What do you see?

• 48:46Pablo Torre?

  Next to my butter self.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  There.

• 48:49Pablo Torre?

  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. Butter me and I would explore each other.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Ah, well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately, uh, object.

• 49:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I feel like something good has happened that I don't entirely want to uh, celebrate, but in inside.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  You have to celebrate this.

• 49:18Pablo Torre?

  Inside, I am overjoyed is like in my eyes. They're telling a story.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  What's the story being told?

• 49:26Pablo Torre?

  These are the eyes of someone who is encountering.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:30Pablo Torre?

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

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 49:37Pablo Torre?

  In Jacksonville, Florida, and they're thinking to themselves, I think it's time.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  God, you're a bigger man than I am. Um, is there a way to preserve this?

• 49:50Pablo Torre?

  Apparently, we have a couple of hours.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Okay, I want you to document it because it'll get better.

• 49:57Pablo Torre?

  Mmm.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  It'll get much better as it loses its structural integrity and becomes more abstract and melts. There's an artist named Urs Fischer.

• 50:12Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, a Swiss visual artist.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  And put in candle sculptures. It's melt, huge melted candle sculptures. So document that, you'll get famous, and you can get the hell out of the podcast game.

• 50:28Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God. I, uh, I've learned, I found out so much today, Jerry.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  You too.

• 50:37Pablo Torre?

  Mostly that maybe you actually can buy love.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  You got that for free. You didn't need anything. You just needed your beautiful self. And art.

• 50:51Pablo Torre?

  Jerry Saltz.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 50:53Pablo Torre?

  I'm gonna remember this day for the rest of my life.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  I will too.

• 51:10Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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