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Comment by white_dragon88 | Hacker News Reader

One of the most pointless wastes of money I’ve ever seen. I consider myself an artist and understand it’s value, but a 30M fund for what, some blocks of concrete in a desert??? That money could go to far more useful applications, and instead it’s dedicated to a monument to hubris. ‘Magnum opus’ my ass.

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More pointless than this ongoing $126M bus lane project in SF?

https://sfbayca.com/2021/01/21/__trashed-3/

Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.

It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.

One could (and many do) burn 30M rather quickly building and trying to scale up some completely pointless app or service.

Disagree. You could say that about any monument but really over the long term that’s what builds culture and meaning.

Fact is, up until recently, monuments were dismantled and their materials used for other purposes both by subsequent rulers and by the population at large. If this art installation were to become the basis of an actual settlement in 100 years I'd say the money wasn't wasted. Unfortunatly we have so much unjustified reverence towards art that doing so would probably be forbidden and these structures will simply rot and disintegrate

Culture is created therefore by literal dirt on the bottom of my shoe. By the very nature of being. Well, that's great. But eventually the word loses all meaning. It becomes a filler for "this thing exists at least ephemerally in the world we inhabit... how... monumental."

If anything is art, then all judgement is moot. It's pointless for any of us to even engage. Agree. Agree. Disagree. Blah. I may as well throw my mooty mud into the mix of debate. To me, there is not a singular emotion this piece evokes other than a self-indulgent egotistic lump of cement articulated with, (reviews await), likely, essays of arbitrarily cloying fascination. It's fine as a thing that exists. Whatever. But it is equally a sinkhole of value.

Monuments need to be visible to normal people in order to have any cultural value. If the Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty were in a secluded forest, they wouldn't have had any real impact on culture.

Agreed. I love art that challenges our perceptions of reality, society, even that which questions urbanism as a form of aesthetic pursuit. But this is just absolutely poo. A self-indulgent stain of hubris.

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