Pic of the Day

Spillway gates for the Akkat power station dam in Sweden

Playing Geoguesser this morning and this bizarre artwork showed up. From some road signs I deduced it was in Sweden, but I still ended up 300 kilometers from the dam. A little Googling got me to a Wikipedia page that names the artists responsible.

When I first saw this I thought it might have been native American Indians from the Northwest USA, then I thought maybe from the Southwest, but these paintings look like they were deliberately crudely painted, something you don't see in any public display of American Indian art.

I don't quite understand this tendency towards ugly. I ran into some exceptionally ugly paintings in a brew pub in downtown Portland last week. If that is the best you can do, well, okay, I guess, but why would anyone put it on public display? I suspect limousine Bolsheviks, people who are well ensconced by a thick wad of money, but have no appreciation for any real beauty or talent. It reminds me of Inland Empire, a horrible, pointless idiotic film by David Lynch. I've seen several other of his films and I thought they were pretty great.

Maybe this is the low end of class warfare. Some people are exceptionally talented, and they are celebrated and praised. Then we have our average folks who go about their jobs, raise their families and drink their beer. Then we have people who got short changed in the valuable skill department, but are still doing their bit without much in the way of recognition, so they do things like this.