Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Athlete Statues, Reviewed by Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Jerry Saltz (PTFO Vault) About this episode 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.)
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Transcript 7,620 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:58 Pablo 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.
2:43 Pablo 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.
3:24 Pablo Torre? I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
3:29 Speaker 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!
3:43 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:50 Speaker 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.
4:08 Pablo Torre? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Are we rolling, Chris?
4:11 Speaker 04 You want all of this?
4:12 Pablo Torre? Unfortunately...
4:14 Speaker 04 We'll start again when you're ready.
4:16 Pablo 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?
4:27 Speaker 04 Yeah. Do you know yours?
4:29 Pablo Torre? I do.
4:30 Speaker 04 What is it?
4:31 Pablo Torre? Well, we're gonna...
4:32 Speaker 04 But is it like...
4:33 Pablo Torre? I would tell you, but it's my password to everything, and it is very hackable.
4:36 Speaker 04 And it's like an old address?
4:38 Pablo 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.
4:45 Speaker 04 Got it. Got it. I know what it is. It's okay.
4:48 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Well, now, now I'm very insecure about what I project.
5:10 Pablo Torre? For people who don't know Jerry Saltz, by the way, thank you so much for being here.
5:13 Speaker 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.
5:21 Pablo 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.
5:31 Speaker 04 Right.
5:32 Pablo Torre? I am a magazine nerd, a journalism practitioner, but also acolyte in an era where that's intimidating.
5:39 Speaker 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.
5:58 Pablo Torre? Yeah. How long away are we from that?
6:01 Speaker 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.
6:15 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
6:15 Speaker 04 And screw them.
6:16 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah. Are you a sports fan?
6:18 Speaker 04 I, uh, I'm a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants.
6:27 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
6:27 Speaker 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.
6:37 Pablo 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.
6:44 Speaker 04 Wow.
6:45 Pablo Torre? And, uh, that felt like, uh, a grotesque, uh, performance art at a certain point.
6:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:52 Pablo Torre? The fifth inning, just the worst inning in baseball history, arguably just so many self-inflicted wounds.
6:57 Speaker 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.
7:06 Pablo 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?
7:26 Speaker 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.
7:45 Pablo Torre? You were banned from Facebook at one point.
7:47 Speaker 04 Right. I had over a half million followers. I have like six or 700,000 now.
7:55 Pablo Torre? But who's counting?
7:55 Speaker 04 But I am because it's all I have.
8:00 Speaker 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
8:41 Speaker 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
9:19 Speaker 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
9:59 Speaker 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.
10:44 Pablo Torre? I mean, what you're describing is stuff that might be found in museums, right?
10:49 Speaker 04 It's great art.
10:49 Pablo Torre? This is like high art.
10:51 Speaker 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.
11:35 Speaker 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.
11:50 Pablo Torre? Cross out my will there be time travel question.
11:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, see?
11:58 Pablo 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
12:36 Pablo 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.
12:55 Pablo 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?
13:05 Speaker 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.
13:48 Speaker 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.
14:23 Pablo Torre? That is so far all true.
14:25 Speaker 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.
14:47 Pablo Torre? Did you have a handle, like the CB?
14:49 Speaker 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.
15:11 Speaker 04 I did this for 10 years.
15:12 Pablo Torre? Man.
15:13 Speaker 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.
15:58 Speaker 04 You don't know what it was like.
16:00 Pablo Torre? And yet, in that story, that deeply bleak story that happened to you in Jacksonville, Florida, there is a lesson for me.
16:06 Speaker 04 What?
16:07 Pablo Torre? By the end of this episode, I will determine exactly what I should take away as a lesson from your streak of prostitutelessness.
16:16 Speaker 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.
16:49 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say.
16:50 Speaker 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.
17:11 Pablo Torre? Interrogates a great art critic word, by the way.
17:13 Speaker 04 And which you should never use. Anyway, so I started writing that way and slowly.
17:23 Speaker 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.
18:07 Speaker 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.
18:41 Pablo 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.
19:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:00 Pablo 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.
19:09 Speaker 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.
19:41 Pablo Torre? That's incredible.
19:42 Speaker 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.
19:58 Pablo Torre? Ambition is a word that comes to mind.
20:00 Speaker 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?
20:10 Pablo Torre? I am 39 years old.
20:12 Speaker 04 Already. You think I'm over the hill, I'm washed up.
20:17 Pablo Torre? Yeah, my neck actually does hurt.
20:18 Speaker 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.
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22:27 Pablo Torre? Your view that to love art is to criticize it rigorously.
22:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:35 Pablo Torre? Do you feel like that is the default in your profession? How has that sort of maybe evolved itself over time?
22:41 Speaker 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.
23:23 Speaker 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.
23:42 Speaker 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.
24:14 Pablo 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.
24:24 Speaker 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.
24:46 Pablo Torre? That's right.
24:47 Speaker 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.
25:28 Speaker 04 There's still space for that, but not out there in the market.
25:33 Pablo 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.
25:54 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
25:55 Pablo Torre? By Ghislaine Wiley.
25:56 Speaker 04 Right.
25:56 Pablo Torre? Very famous artist himself.
25:59 Speaker 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.
26:44 Speaker 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
27:24 Speaker 04 Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyonce, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherald.
27:34 Pablo Torre? The Cahinde Wiley portrait for just those who did not-
27:38 Speaker 04 Do you like it?
27:38 Pablo Torre? Well, so here's the thing that-
27:40 Speaker 04 It's realistic.
27:42 Pablo 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.
28:09 Speaker 04 Good.
28:09 Pablo Torre? And then, I guess my issue is, in retrospect, is my evolution in taste happened, is that he just kept on doing it
28:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:19 Pablo Torre? again and again and again, and it became formulaic, admittedly.
28:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:24 Pablo Torre? And it sort of felt like he had one idea and he managed to execute it a zillion times.
28:30 Speaker 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.
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30:52 Pablo Torre? Do you know who Dwyane Wade is?
30:55 Speaker 04 I do not know. Who is Dwyane Wade?
30:58 Pablo Torre? This is perfect.
31:02 Speaker 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.
31:16 Speaker 10 That is not D Wade. That's Shannon Sharpe, The Rock. Like, who is that?
31:20 Speaker 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.
31:51 Speaker 04 So that's Dwyane Wade. Great, great athlete.
31:53 Pablo Torre? Yes, Dwyane Wade is maybe the greatest player in Miami Heat history. He is the guy posing as such. Fist-balled, mouth open.
32:05 Speaker 04 Right.
32:06 Pablo Torre? Ferocious.
32:07 Speaker 04 Right.
32:07 Pablo 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.
32:17 Speaker 04 Right.
32:18 Pablo Torre? And the first response that everybody has is, "That [bleep] doesn't look like Dwyane Wade."
32:25 Speaker 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
33:05 Speaker 04 its material. It found a photograph, scanned it most likely or some and reproduced it. It's crap.
33:14 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
33:15 Speaker 04 How much did they pay for it? A hundred dollars, 200?
33:20 Pablo Torre? We don't know exactly what was paid, Jerry.
33:24 Speaker 04 Do you like it?
33:26 Pablo Torre? I, I, I don't.
33:27 Speaker 04 It's
33:28 Pablo Torre? But I also want to point out when it comes to resemblance.
33:32 Speaker 04 Right.
33:33 Pablo Torre? Okay. How important is it for the statue of somebody to be actually a photo realistic depiction of them in real life?
33:44 Speaker 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
34:24 Speaker 04 and I found a photograph and I made it without paying much attention to it at all.
34:30 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
34:31 Speaker 04 Other than the, the signature pose.
34:35 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
34:36 Speaker 04 So in the next generation, we'll look at that sculpture and see metal.
34:43 Speaker 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.
34:51 Pablo Torre? Right, the bronze.
34:52 Speaker 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.
35:20 Pablo 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?
35:28 Speaker 04 I'd love to hear it.
35:29 Speaker 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.
35:46 Speaker 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.
35:57 Speaker 04 Of course he did, okay.
35:59 Pablo Torre? So that's Omri Amrani, I should say, the co-sculptor, I guess, they have some sort of, you know.
36:04 Speaker 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.
36:24 Pablo Torre? I feel about to say allegedly, I guess, in there somewhere, but I don't want to step on your critique.
36:29 Speaker 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.
36:52 Pablo Torre? It doesn't look like Dwyane Wade at all.
36:53 Speaker 04 No, and that's fine, Dwayne Reed liked it and he's cool with it.
37:00 Speaker 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.
37:26 Pablo Torre? What do you think of this sculpture? Are you familiar with this work?
37:31 Speaker 04 Is that Rocky?
37:32 Pablo Torre? This is the, this is the Rocky statue?
37:34 Speaker 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.
37:45 Pablo Torre? Yes.
37:46 Speaker 04 Okay.
37:46 Pablo Torre? Discus throwers and...
37:48 Speaker 04 Yeah. This, as much as I love the first Rocky movie...
37:53 Pablo Torre? Oh, I mean, by the way, the kids out there should know, this was an Oscar-worthy...
37:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:58 Pablo Torre? Screenplay, performance, all of it. Actually good.
38:02 Speaker 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...
38:18 Pablo Torre? Oh, the Dwyane Wade, you mean?
38:19 Speaker 04 The Dwyane Wade.
38:20 Pablo Torre? I love that you have no idea who Dwyane Wade is. I mean that so sincerely.
38:24 Speaker 04 I'm sorry.
38:24 Pablo Torre? You're the, you're the most pure sample that we could have for this exercise, so I love it.
38:30 Speaker 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?
38:45 Pablo Torre? That's true, all of that's true.
38:47 Speaker 04 It's fine. You know, Dwayne Reed and, and that guy, he, they contributed a lot to the culture.
38:55 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
38:55 Speaker 04 They should get statues of themselves.
38:58 Pablo Torre? Sure.
38:59 Speaker 04 You should. I just hope that yours will be better.
39:03 Pablo Torre? Yeah. I would, I would like to submit...
39:06 Speaker 04 More, let's see more.
39:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, can we, can we get Michael Jordan on the screen, please?
39:10 Speaker 04 The greatest of all.
39:12 Pablo Torre? So this is how they commemorated the greatest, his airness, outside of the United Center where the Chicago Bulls...
39:18 Speaker 04 I love the figure underneath him. Can I see the, the close-up of the humunculus beneath him?
39:27 Speaker 04 Wow.
39:28 Pablo Torre? There is a humunculus aspect to the person he is dunking over.
39:32 Speaker 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.
40:16 Speaker 04 This is a frozen moment in time. The basketball is just on Michael's fingertips.
40:22 Pablo Torre? Yes.
40:22 Speaker 04 His left hand is giving himself balance. His feet are spread out for maximum height and balance. The person underneath him becomes meaningless.
40:33 Pablo Torre? Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped over.
40:36 Speaker 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.
40:58 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
40:58 Speaker 04 Who made that one?
40:59 Pablo Torre? So this was one of the two guys that made the Dwyane Wade sculpt.
41:03 Speaker 04 He his older work is better.
41:06 Pablo Torre? Yeah, no, I agree.
41:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:08 Pablo Torre? I agree. This is this is an amazing statue.
41:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:11 Pablo 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.
41:21 Speaker 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.
41:35 Pablo Torre? Yes.
41:36 Speaker 04 Okay? And you're getting that self reiterative.
41:42 Speaker 04 Smoothing out and deadening that that will do.
41:46 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Can we just show you Brandy Chastain for a second?
41:49 Speaker 04 Who's that?
41:50 Pablo 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.
41:59 Speaker 04 What's the sport that Brandy?
42:00 Pablo Torre? Soccer.
42:01 Speaker 04 I would call it a travesty of mimosis, meaning it doesn't look anything mimetic art.
42:10 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
42:10 Speaker 04 Because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde, and made her into Gertrude Stein.
42:20 Speaker 04 And for that, that's kind of interesting, or, you know, like a Russian policewoman, but...
42:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah, so Eleanor Roosevelt, perhaps?
42:31 Speaker 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.
42:41 Pablo Torre? Yeah, her view was, I think, to your point, quote, "It's not the most flattering, but it's nice."
42:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's not untrue.
42:49 Pablo Torre? Right.
42:49 Speaker 04 It's good to be remembered.
42:51 Pablo Torre? Right, not great is that she also looks like Gary Busey, I guess.
42:54 Speaker 04 God, yes, that's the grimace. I don't know where the grimace came from.
43:00 Pablo 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.
43:08 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, you got it. It's a picture of Gary Busey. They could change it out.
43:14 Pablo 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.
43:22 Speaker 04 I do know him.
43:23 Pablo Torre? Oh, okay.
43:23 Speaker 04 Because soccer is a great sport and American men can... What?
43:28 Pablo Torre? So, so this is Ronaldo.
43:31 Speaker 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.
43:52 Pablo Torre? The eyes are doing a lot here.
43:53 Speaker 04 He's looking at with sheer madness.
43:57 Speaker 04 I'd love to meet that artist. I mean, that is wild.
44:01 Pablo Torre? The artist's name is Emmanuel Santos.
44:03 Speaker 04 That's the artist?
44:04 Pablo Torre? That is Ronaldo.
44:05 Speaker 04 Okay.
44:06 Pablo 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.
44:19 Speaker 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.
44:26 Pablo Torre? Whoa. So you love this one?
44:28 Speaker 04 Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo. That's fine.
44:32 Pablo Torre? But in a vacuum, you love this specific work.
44:35 Speaker 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.
44:43 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
44:44 Speaker 04 That's mad [BLEEP].
44:47 Pablo Torre? There's one more thing we'd like you to evaluate.
44:49 Speaker 04 Yes.
44:50 Pablo Torre? If you can hold.
44:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:52 Pablo Torre? Until after the break.
45:07 Pablo Torre? Jerry, you've stuck around very generously, and we brought in Sophie from the other side of the glass.
45:11 Speaker 04 Love it.
45:13 Pablo Torre? Because this is an original work that I have not seen. So we'll be viewing this for the first time together, genuinely.
45:21 Speaker 04 Okay.
45:21 Pablo Torre? Not a bit. I have not seen this.
45:22 Speaker 04 I'll let you react to it first.
45:24 Pablo 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.
45:38 Pablo Torre? And Sophie, will you unveil?
45:40 Speaker 11 Absolutely.
45:41 Pablo Torre? The sculpture.
45:44 Pablo Torre? Very delicately from the... I mean...
45:53 Speaker 04 What do you think?
45:54 Pablo Torre? I-
45:54 Speaker 04 Is facing him now. I know what I think.
45:58 Pablo Torre? I don't know if I've ever felt the feeling that I'm feeling right now.
46:02 Speaker 04 What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face?
46:06 Pablo Torre? It's hard not to think that this person is, uh... More handsome than me.
46:16 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
46:17 Pablo Torre? I should probably reveal for the audio audience that my staff has commissioned a butter sculpture of me.
46:26 Speaker 04 Wow. Um- It's larger than life size, slightly larger.
46:32 Pablo Torre? It's really impressive. It's I... The, the, the texturing of my hair?
46:38 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
46:39 Pablo 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?
46:50 Speaker 04 I gotta come around.
46:51 Pablo Torre? Yeah, let's rotate, let's rotate the microphone for, uh-
46:53 Speaker 04 How do I get this over there?
46:55 Pablo Torre? I think you can just rotate it this way.
46:56 Speaker 04 Alright, I'm coming around.
46:58 Pablo Torre? This is **** incredible. Like, it is covered in butter. This old base.
47:05 Speaker 04 Wow. See, I thought you looked like JFK. Here, touch it.
47:11 Pablo Torre? It's so-
47:12 Speaker 04 Touch the sculpture, touch it.
47:13 Pablo Torre? Jerry and I are touching it, and it's, and it's legitimately-
47:17 Speaker 04 Right.
47:18 Pablo Torre? Dairy.
47:18 Speaker 04 It's butter.
47:19 Pablo Torre? It's legit dairy.
47:21 Speaker 04 It's Naples yellow butter. You have a great open collar, a t-shirt.
47:28 Pablo Torre? Yep, yep, yep.
47:29 Speaker 04 Do you have a mustache?
47:30 Pablo 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.
47:47 Speaker 04 You, you look like a statesman, actually.
47:50 Pablo Torre? I do!
47:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:52 Pablo Torre? I look like I am, uh, more in charge than I feel day to day. Have you ever evaluated a butter sculpture before?
48:00 Speaker 04 Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture, being from the Midwest.
48:04 Pablo Torre? Oh, that's right.
48:05 Speaker 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.
48:30 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I mean, if you were.
48:31 Speaker 04 Put his head next to it. Let me get my phone and take its picture.
48:35 Pablo Torre? Jerry's going to take a photo of this.
48:37 Speaker 04 And I'll make you famous or something like that.
48:41 Pablo Torre? I'm staring at myself in the glass.
48:45 Speaker 04 You are. What do you see?
48:46 Pablo Torre? Next to my butter self.
48:48 Speaker 04 There.
48:49 Pablo 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.
48:58 Speaker 04 Ah, well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately, uh, object.
49:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I feel like something good has happened that I don't entirely want to uh, celebrate, but in inside.
49:16 Speaker 04 You have to celebrate this.
49:18 Pablo Torre? Inside, I am overjoyed is like in my eyes. They're telling a story.
49:24 Speaker 04 What's the story being told?
49:26 Pablo Torre? These are the eyes of someone who is encountering.
49:29 Speaker 04 Right.
49:30 Pablo Torre? Maybe this is literal, maybe this is figurative, Jerry. They're encountering their first prostitute.
49:37 Speaker 04 Wow.
49:37 Pablo Torre? In Jacksonville, Florida, and they're thinking to themselves, I think it's time.
49:43 Speaker 04 God, you're a bigger man than I am. Um, is there a way to preserve this?
49:50 Pablo Torre? Apparently, we have a couple of hours.
49:52 Speaker 04 Okay, I want you to document it because it'll get better.
49:57 Pablo Torre? Mmm.
49:58 Speaker 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.
50:12 Pablo Torre? Yeah, oh, yeah, a Swiss visual artist.
50:14 Speaker 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.
50:28 Pablo Torre? Oh, God. I, uh, I've learned, I found out so much today, Jerry.
50:35 Speaker 04 You too.
50:37 Pablo Torre? Mostly that maybe you actually can buy love.
50:42 Speaker 04 You got that for free. You didn't need anything. You just needed your beautiful self. And art.
50:51 Pablo Torre? Jerry Saltz.
50:53 Speaker 04 Thank you.
50:53 Pablo Torre? I'm gonna remember this day for the rest of my life.
50:58 Speaker 04 I will too.
51:10 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
51:16 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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