By now almost everyone has shared their ridicule and criticism about the Dwyane Wade statue the Miami Heat recently unveiled at their arena.
In fact, anything else critics say at this point gets overlooked because it’s stating the obvious; people overwhelmingly do not like the work of “art.”
But Pablo Torre Finds Out found a new approach to talk about the statue on Tuesday. The podcast featured a special guest, Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic for New York Magazine.
You have never heard anyone trash anything as hard as Saltz ripped the much-maligned Wade statue. Some of his comments were hilarious.
“It doesn’t look anything like him,” Saltz said. “What I’ll say is that is an absolute s*** work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy.
“He looks like The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), he looks white — which is fine with me — but it has no character. It has no ambience, it has no internal scale, it has no feel for its material. It found a photograph, scanned it most likely, or some sh*t and reproduced it. It’s crap!”
“How much did they pay for it, $100? 200?” Saltz continued.
“We don’t know exactly what was paid, Jerry,” Torre responded.
“I would pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard,” Saltz said.
Torre then cued a news video of one of the statue’s two sculptors, Omri Amrany, standing in front of the statue, defending his work.
“It looks like art by committee,” Saltz said. “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.”
Torre wisely interrupted at that point.
“I feel you should say ‘allegedly,’ I guess, in there somewhere,” Torre said.
“To me, I allege that they might be scammers in this sense: Oscar Wilde said ‘All the worst poetry is sincere,'” Saltz said. “So what that they sincerely wanted to make this realistic. … I don’t think it looks like anybody.”
Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic for @NYMag, took a flamethrower to the Heat’s new Dwyane Wade statue. 😭😂
“That is an absolute sh*t work of art. It looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. … He looks like The Rock, he looks white — which… pic.twitter.com/nV4HAdVYU0
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) December 3, 2024
The award-winning art critic concluded with what sounded like a damning critique of the indulgence of some modern artists.
“Could they have made something magnificent? Yes, they could,” Saltz said. “But they could have also made something much worse. It could have been a piece of string, tied to a chain, some bullsh*t … So this is a happy medium.”
Given Saltz’s pedigree, this Wade statue criticism stands up there with the best we’ve seen so far, although there are many contenders. Bill Simmons called it “the worst statue of all time” and said, “It looked like somebody who had emerged from a fire and lived.” Charles Barkley got right to the point, saying, “They gotta take that thing down.”
[Pablo Torre Finds Out]
