Pablo Torre Finds Out - Athlete Statues, Reviewed by Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Jerry Saltz (PTFO Vault)

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

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.)• Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and inviteshttps://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.com. 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.

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, are 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 hand-picked episode from deep inside the PtFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. and today we're going to find out what this sound is. That is an absolute shi-work of art

because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. It's crap. Right after this ad. I only know how to use Instagram because the 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. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Are we rolling, Chris? You want all of this. I unfortunately... We'll start again when you're ready. We've started. Okay.

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? Yeah. Do you know yours? I do. What is it? Well, we're going to...

But is it like... I would tell you, but it's my password to everything, and it is very hackable. And it's like an old address or your... It's a thing that's very dear to me. I'm like talking to a mentalist, I feel like. Okay. It's very dear to me. It's a childhood resonance.

Oh, got it. I know what it is. It's okay. Yeah. Well, now I'm very insecure about what I project. For people who don't know Jerry Sells, by the way, thank you so much for being here. 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. 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. Right. I am a magazine nerd, a journalism practitioner, but also an acolyte in an era where that's intimidating. 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. Yeah. How long away are we from that? 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. Oh, God. They have to completely rethink everything. We hate them. Yeah. And screw them. Yeah, yeah.

Are you a sports fan? I am a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants. And that's it. And I'm a huge F1 nerd since the TV show and the pre-pandemic and all of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait a minute. So Yankees-wise, I am here to report that I was at Game 5 of the World Series.

Wow. And that felt like a grotesque performance art at a certain point. Yeah. The fifth inning, just the worst inning in baseball history, arguably just so many self-inflicted wounds. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I'm a fair weather fan. I used to go, oh, we're boring your audience. Let's move on.

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? 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 the Twitter or the Facebook.

or no, I can't get on Facebook. You were banned from Facebook at one point. Right. I had over a half million followers. I have like six or seven hundred thousand now. But who's counting? But I am because it's all I have. 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 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, and I would, 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. And then I would sit in silence. 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 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, 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 digitalized and rediscovered and were being seen for the first time. A lot of these are very violent or the ones I would post. and I would post like a woman having her breast 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. I mean, what you're describing is stuff that might be found in museums, right? It's great art. This is like high art. 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 nothing about anything. we barely have an inner life. 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. Cross out my will there be time travel question. Yeah, see? But as for the other questions that I had prepared to ask Jerry Salts, 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, Dwayne Wade, is not always as popular as the person it seeks to honor. And so I wanted Jerry and his Pulitzer and his three years,

honorary doctorates and his decades 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. 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? 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.

At 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. 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.

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. That is so far all true. All those things I listened to. And I self-exiled from the art 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. Did you have a handle, like the CB? 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, spoke to me. Either I'm a slow talker or they just recognized an A Rube. I did this for 10 years.

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. You don't know what it was like. And yet, in that story, that deeply bleak story that happened to you in Jacksonville, Florida. There is a lesson for me. By the end of this episode, I will determine exactly what I should take away as a lesson

from your streak of prostitutesness. 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. I was going to say. No. So I became an art critic, and I started writing absolute bullshit. 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.

Interrogates a great art critic word, by the way. Yeah, and which you should never use. Anyway, so I started writing that way, and slowly I found my own voice. And at 41, 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 going to be easy.

You have to 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 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. You have to have a coven or whatever those things are called.

Sure. 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. Yeah, I want to actually jump in on that because as an artist yourself, I do want to reveal that I've done a minor bit of research, Jerry, into your uvra. 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. So I want to 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.

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 100 cantos or chapters. I was going to do 100 works on each of the 100 canos, and it would be a 25-year project. I know I'm nuts. It would be a 25-year project. 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... Ambition is a word that comes to mine. 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? I am 39 years old. Already. You think I'm over the hill.

I'm washed up. Yeah, my neck actually does hurt. 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. Your view that to love art is to criticize it, rigorously. Yeah. Do you feel like that is the default in your profession?

How is that sort of maybe evolved itself over time? 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. 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.

We put this woman artist 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.

Oh, 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. 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. That's right. 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-Herzertz are called Ecstatic Truths, which means opening spaces for consciousness to step outside yourself, to slow time down. there's still space for that, but not out there in the market. 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 am not overstating this, you critiqued a presidential portrait of Barack Obama. Oh, yeah.

By the Hinde Wiley. Right. Very famous. artist himself? I said it was shiot. I said it was shit. 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 shit because it's photorealism. Good for photorealism. 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. 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 Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyonce, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherald.

The Cahinde Wiley portrait for just those who did not... Do you like it? Well, so here's a thing that... It's realistic. 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 filigrees, to all of it. And I'm the guy, by the way, who saw that and I was like, I'm going to buy the book at the gift shop. Good. This is cool. Good. It is cool.

I guess my issue is, in retrospect, is my evolution in taste happened, is that he just kept on doing it again and again and again. And it became formulaic, admittedly. Yeah. And it sort of felt like he had one idea. and he managed to execute it a zillion times. Bingo.

And you know what? There are a lot of artists like that. 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.

Do you know who Dwayne Wade is? I do not know. Who is Dwayne Wade? This is perfect. Tonight, there's a mystery brewing in South Florida. I can't believe that guy. It's supposed to be a statue. of the man asking that question.

Miami Heat legend Dwayne Wade, but the internet is not quite so sure. That is not D. Wade. That's Shannon Sharp, the Rock. Like, who is that? 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 scorers table, some will tell you that's got to be Dwayne Wade.

With a, Wade picking this iconic moment from his game-winning steel and shot against the Chicago Bulls in 2009. Wade puts it up for the win. So that's Dwayne Wade, great, great athlete. Yes, Dwayne Wade is maybe the greatest player in Miami Heat history. He is the guy posing as such fists, bald, mouth open, ferocious. Right. And it raises the question of when you are making a. a statue, a work of art that is meant to be a tribute to someone.

Right. And the first response that everybody has is, that f*** doesn't look like Dwayne Wade. That's true. It doesn't look anything like him. What I'll say is that is an absolute shi-de work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. and it's just got, 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 ambience, it has no internal scale, it has no feel for its material. It found a photograph, scanned it most likely, or some... and reproduced it. It's crap. How much did they pay for it? $100, $200?

We don't know exactly what was paid, Jerry. Do you like it? I don't. But I also want to point out when it comes to resemblance. Right. Okay. How important is it for the statue of somebody to be actually a photo-realistic.

depiction of them in real life? 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 and I found a photograph and I made it without paying much attention to it at all other than the signature pose. So in the next generation, we'll look at that sculpture and see metal. 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.

Right. The bronze. That's all that are going to 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. Can I, does it do anything for you if I play a video of the artist's response to a larger reaction? I'd love to hear it. I would say to anybody that's, you know, even slightly critical, come to Miami. Come to me, I mean, take a look at it in person, and you'll be very pleasantly surprised. Both of the sculptures artists defending their work, St. Wade visited with them four times, adding they used a computer to get the details right. 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. Of course he did. Okay. So that's Omri Amrani, I should say. The co-sculptor, I guess. They have some sort of... 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. I feel about you to say allegedly, I guess, in there somewhere, but I don't want to step on your critique. To me, I'm...

alleged that they might be scammers in this sense that Oscar Weil 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. It doesn't look like Dwayne Wade at all. No.

That's fine. Dwayne Reid liked it and he's cool with it. And could they have made some? 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-h-h-h-hick. That happens as well. So this is a happy medium between thinking and non-thinking that looks like a photograph in three-dimension. What do you think of this sculpture? Are you familiar with this work? Is that Rocky?

This is the Rocky statue. 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. Yes. Okay. Discus throwers and...

Yeah. This, as much as I love the first Rocky movie. Oh, and by the way, the kids out there should know, this was an Oscar-worthy screenplay, performance, all of it. Actually good. Yeah. 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... Oh, the Dwayne Wade, you mean? The Dwayne Wade. I love that you have no fucking idea who Dwayne Wade is.

I mean that so sincerely. I'm sorry. You're the most pure sample that we could have for this exercise. So I love it. So this is another, is that you? No. I love. That's Sylvester Stallone.

He's as tall as I am. I love him. He's a big Trump guy, but he's done good work. And you know what? That's true. All that's true. It's fine. You know, Dwayne Reed and that guy, they contributed it a lot to the culture.

Yeah. They should get statues of themselves. Sure. You should. I just hope that yours will be better. Yeah. I would like to submit. More.

Let's see more. Can we get Michael Jordan on the screen, please? The greatest of all. So this is how they commemorated the greatest, his heerness, outside of the United Center where the Chicago Bulls have basketball. I love the figure underneath him. Can I see the close-up of the humunculus beneath him? Wow.

There is a humunculus. aspect to the person he is dunking over. The figure underneath Michael is great, and he's got an extra face. His face has fallen off. It's like an arm with like 70 figure. 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.

The Baroque back in the 1600s was the invention of movies, of the cinematic, dramatic, melodramatic, motion. Action, action. This is an action shot. This is a frozen moment in time. The basketball is just on Michael's fingertips. His left hand is giving himself balance. His feet are spread out for maximum high. and balance. The person underneath him becomes meaningless.

Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped over. It's you. That's mortal reality, immortal reality. Again, the realism is what it is. That's not bad. He's like his hair under his arm. His lip is being clinched. He's like staring at the target. There's stuff going on there. Yeah. Who made that one? So this was one of the two guys that made the Dwayne Wade sculpt. His holder work is better.

Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah, this is a much better. This is an amazing statue that I can imagine Dwayne Wade in Miami Heat or maybe like, can we get our version of that? And they brought him the thing that we evaluated. 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.

Yes. Okay? And you're getting that self-reiterative smoothing out and deadening that that will do. Yeah. Can we just show you Brandy Chastain for a second? Who's that? 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. What's the sport that brand? Soccer. I would call it a travesty of mimosis, meaning it doesn't look anything memetic art. Yeah. Because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde,

and made her into Gertrude Stein. And for that, that's kind of interesting. Or, you know, like a Russian, a police woman. Yeah, so Eleanor Roosevelt perhaps. 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. Yeah. Her view was, I think to your point, quote, it's not the most flattering, but it's nice. Yeah, that's not untrue. It's good to be remembered.

Right. Not great is that she also looks like Gary Busey, I guess. God. Yes, that's the grimace. I don't know where the grimace came from. 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 buzian. Yeah, you got it.

It's a picture of Gary Busey. They could change it out. Yeah, yeah. And then lastly, the last, I think, case study for you is just Christiana Ronaldo, who I presume you have no idea. I do know him. Oh, okay. Because soccer is a great sport. and American men can't...

What? So this is... That could be a great piece of folk art. That is a great piece of f***ed 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. He's looking at with sheer mad. I'd love to meet that artist. I mean, that is wild. The artist's name is Emmanuel Santos. That's the artist? That is Ronaldo.

Okay. That is Cristiano Ronaldo. So, by the way, does this statue look more like the artist who made it, or Christiana Ronaldo famed is one of the most angular, beautiful, symmetrical faces in human history? Your mileage may vary. That's well said. I think if we saw the picture of the artist, we don't know. But that is one great sculpture.

Whoa. So you love this one. Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo. That's fine. But in a vacuum, you love this specific work. 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. Yeah.

That's mad. There's one more thing we'd like you to evaluate. Yes. If you can hold. Yeah. Until after the break. Jerry, you've stuck around very generously, and we brought in Sophie from the other side of the glass. Love it.

Because this is an original work that I have not seen. So we'll be viewing this for the first time together, genuinely. Okay. Not a bit. I have not seen this. I'll let you react to it first. Okay. I want to give some identifying information.

This is by Jim Victor and Marie Peltin, a couple from Pennsylvania. Their chosen medium is butter. And Sophie, will you unveil the sculpture? Very delicately from the... I mean... What do you think? It's facing him now. I know what I think.

I don't know if I've ever felt the feeling that I'm feeling right now. Okay. What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face? It's hard not to think that this person... is more handsome than me. I should probably reveal for the audio audience that my staff has commissioned a butter sculpture of me. Wow. It's larger than life size, slightly larger.

It's really impressive. It's, I, the, the texturing of my hair. I want to say 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

I gotta come over there Yeah let's rotate the microphone for How do I get this over there? I think you can just rotate it this way All right I'm coming around This is fucking incredible Like it is covered in butter This old base

Wow See I thought you looked like Like JFK, here, touch it. Touch the sculpture, touch it. Jerry and I are touching it and it's legitimately dairy. It's butter. It's legit dairy. It's Naples yellow butter.

You have a great open collar, a T-shirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have a mustache? I do. In this, I have what I aspire. I have the mustache of my dreams. butter me has the facial hair I desire. They were generous with a healthy serving above my upper lip.

You look like a statesman, actually. I do. Yeah. I look like I am more in charge than I feel day to day. Have you ever evaluated a butter sculpture before? Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture being from the Midwest. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

We have, in Wisconsin, there's a whole tradition of it. I'm mad for it. I also look 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 going to touch it a little.

Yeah, I mean, if you were to put his head next to it. Let me get my phone and take its picture. Barry's going to take a photo of this. And I'll make you famous or something. I'm staring at myself in the glass. You are. Where do you see? Next to my butter self.

There. 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. Well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately. object. Yeah, I feel like something good has happened that I don't entirely want to celebrate, but inside...

You have to celebrate this. Inside, I am overjoyed. In my eyes, they're telling a story. What's the story being told? These are the eyes of someone who is encountering. Maybe this is literal, maybe this is figurative, Jerry. They're encountering their... first prostitute in Jacksonville, Florida. And they're thinking of themselves, I think it's time.

God, you're a bigger man than I am. Is there a way to preserve this? Apparently we have a couple of hours. Okay. I want you to document it because it'll get better. It'll get much better as it loses its structural integrity and becomes more abstract and melts. There's an artist named Erz Fisher. Yeah. Oh, yeah. A Swiss visual artist. And put in candle sculptures.

Wow. It's huge melted candle sculptures. Right. Document that. You'll get famous and you can get the hell out of the podcast game. Oh, God. I've learned I found out so much today Jerry mostly that maybe you actually can buy love

you got that for free you didn't need anything you just needed your beautiful self and art Jerry Salts thank you I'm going to remember this day for the rest of my life I will too This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.