Yeah, I know this is the Daily Caller. It’s where I saw the story on another site, and this really does need to be seen to be believed.
You just don’t understand Jonestown Existentialism.
Besides, the project came in under budget.
According to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
I didn’t hate it.
So, I went looking for another picture somewhere else, maybe by somebody who didn’t hate it.
And . . . um . . . I’m afraid I think the Caller has a point.
https://www.koer.or.at/en/projects/wewater/
(Click on the picture in the article to see it larger.)
However, I don’t live in Vienna; so what I think of it isn’t really relevant.
It looks unusual, but not amateurish (in my opinion).
I think a fountain of a Beholder would have looked better. Plus, think of all the water spouts you could have with all the eyes.
Huh. I think it’s pretty neat.
Personally I think this review sounds better in the original German, “Die menschliche Sprache hat keine Worte, um zu beschreiben, wie abscheulich hässlich das ist.”
I just realized that fountain reminds me of roadside places in the U.S. that sell concrete statuary of all sorts of things, like animals (Labrador retrievers, monkeys, goats, birds, raccoons etc.), Catholic saints, Buddha figures, mermaids, cute widdle concrete children holding concrete baskets, giant spheres, artichokes etc.
The Vienna project artists went for spacier stuff, but the effect is similar.
Behind the speaker you literally have the poop emoji.
I like one I coined:
It would take an entire brand-new language to adequately describe how ugly that is.
But, hey, at least they’re not as bad (IMHO) as UC Davis Eggheads. When my mother saw the one in front of the administration building, she said, It looks like a penis with a face and the foreskin pulled down."
I bet it doesn’t last a month before someone vandalises it. There’s going to be a lot of ongoing repair and maintainance costs with that… thing.
This fountain could only be described in Vogon poetry.
Pikers. You want an ugly fountain? Here’s an ugly fountain.
Located right on the San Francisco bay near the foot of Market St. In this view you can see the Ferry Building nearby.
The cost, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was $2,355,916. So almost the same. I think we got a lot more ugly for our dollars than they did for their euros.
I’m probably missing the point of this story, but I can’t read (or hear) the words “ugly fountain” without picturing this one.
That’s what I thought I saw, too. In the small pic on my phone it looks vaguely obscene…
They should have stuck with sausages.
Maybe it’s just extreme lack of artistic taste on my part, but while I don’t think that new Viennese fountain looks lovely or exquisite or anything, it would never have occurred to me to describe it as ugly.
As hogarth said, it certainly doesn’t look amateurish: the juxtaposition of realistic human figures with cartoonish and fantasy ones is very obviously deliberate and done with technical skill.
I will concur, though, that the fountain gives an uglier impression in the shots with people prominent in the foreground than it does when photographed by itself. I think a lot of public-works sculptors these days are perhaps too focused on what their artwork looks like on its own as a “gallery” piece, and neglect the importance of making it serve as a harmonious or pleasing background for human figures. If it looks significantly less good with a bunch of people between it and the viewer, it’s not good public sculpture.
“Human language has no words to describe how hideously ugly this is,”
That sums it up pretty neatly.
That fountain is awesome.
The one in Vienna is “playful.” I like it.