What the cat dragged in

Boomer puke du jour

An architect has a neon-sign artwork installed in the window of his city office. Not really cutting-edge newsworthy stuff, until you get to this - yes, as well as the inevitable hefty contribution from the public purse, the architect actually kicked in some of his own money towards the artwork! Yes, and it was a “substantial amount”! Architect John Wardle must be a bountiful neo-Medici – actually putting a tiny fraction (I’m sure) of his own money to part-pay for a commissioned something, that is therefore of his own taste, and that sits inside his own building.

And the boomer group puke-fest gets even better when the story’s third party expert, gallery director Chris McAuliffe, gets to chime in:

commend[ing] Wardle for commissioning the work: "It's actually good to see a company doing something other than dumping a sculpture on the forecourt or slapping up a painting in the elevator lobby."

Yes, terrible isn’t it, when those corporate ruffians dress-up their showpieces with something off the rack! This probably also means that these un-cognoscenti can’t even look to taxpayers to pick up most of the tab – Dahling, how shocking!

Finally, there is this breathless observation from Gabriella Coslovich, an arts journo whose uber-sycophancy may or may not have been acquired through exposure on the job:

The project is the latest example of Melbourne architecture firms supporting challenging public art - Nonda Katsalidis's Republic Tower on La Trobe Street and Hero Apartments, on Russell Street, are sites for traffic-stopping contemporary images.

As far as I can tell, architect Nonda Katsalidis’s best claim to fame when it comes to “challenging public art” is censoring it himself that is, when he (or at least his paid lackey) are not pressuring others to take it all away on a dump truck.