Note: Section 223a of the Living Statue Guild code prohibits the carrying of cell phones until such time as Blackberry comes out with a model in faux marble gray. With the decreasing availability of public payphones, this provision has become increasingly controversial, especially among living statues portraying space aliens, who are now demanding it be revised to allow them to carry Droids.
Interesting to see Chicago choose the same artist widely hired for public art commissions in Carmel, Indiana (the Naperville of Indianapolis). I don't hate Johnson, but his Rockwellian style is all Main St. nostalgia and has nothing to do with a thriving urban city like Chicago.
ReplyDeleteI recall you once bashing the insipid designs and enforced, sanitized homogeneity of Chicago's new bus shelter/news stand system. This is more in the same vein.
Chicago is a great city cursed with epically banal designs for its public space, rare exceptions like Millennium Park notwithstanding. Chicago has chosen to adopt an explicitly conservative, suburban, even retro-small town Main St. design signature, not something worthy of a 21st century metropolis.