The more I think about this, the more it makes me smile.

An artist (Florentijn Hofman, I'm guessing?) has made a giant rubber duck (or actually, a number of them) and set them afloat in various port cities and other areas near water.

(My personal favorite is the Nurnberg duck).

I guess this is one of those "I may not know art, but I know what I like." I admit, I'm not a huge fan of most modern "public" art - a lot of it is so blandified (to avoid offense) and symbolic that frankly, it's not very interesting to me.

(Sidebar: the new biology building on my graduate school's campus got some public art. Apparently there was some mandate where 10% of the cost of a building had to go for art. So they got some cast-concrete things that were supposed to represent different evolutionary stages of seashells (but one looked like the Japanese lucky poo).

And there was a big pink representation of the ancient alchemical symbol for water - many of the students (this was also the chem building) were irritated that an alchemical symbol (which they saw as an anti-science, pro-"woo" statement) was placed in front of a CHEMISTRY building, and others were simply amused by the fact that for most folks these days, a pink triangle means something different from what (we assumed) the artist intended. (I suppose it could have been a stealth political statement, albeit one that made little sense - if you're putting up a pink triangle, a bio/chem building wouldn't make as much sense as, say, Sociology would)

There was also another sculpture, which I always referred to as the "Gyro loaf" because it looked like those big, irregular, cone-shapes of meat that gyros restaurants carve off of.)

So anyway: much "public" art leaves me cold.

But I love these ducks. Partly because they're simply silly. And I think an awful lot of modern grown-up life suffers from a deficit of whimsy - what silliness we encounter seems to be a more nefarious kind.

I also like the artist's description of his work:

"The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!"

(I assume "mondial" means either "worldly" or "mundane" - I'm guessing Dutch is the artist's primary language. But yes, even just seeing a picture of the ducks in place helps relieve some of the "mondial" tensions I feel)

I also like that he talks about it being "soft and friendly." Not a lot of art aspires to that.

I also like his "watchdog" Max.

Some of his art is more "statementy" - the courier cars are an example of that, but even then, the statement isn't as "pointy" as a lot of art statements are, it's more a bemused, "Hey, look at this...isn't this an odd phenomenon of modern life" rather than an angry, "This is ALL WRONG! This is not how it SHOULD be!"

And while I know there's a place for the more pointed sort of art, I tend to be more drawn to either the bemused questioning or the simple whimsy.

I keep thinking, again and again, of a quotation from one of those back-of-the-magazine essays in Interweave Knits - it was one that ran in the issue that came out after September 11, 2001. The writer of the essay made the comment that she tended to think of art as being the human attempt to understand tragedy, and craft, being the human celebration of our creativity and what we can do. (By that definition, some might argue that the giant rubber duck is more craft than art)

Which may be why I tend more to be drawn to craft than art - I'd rather celebrate the good parts of being human and try to ignore the not so good parts. Maybe I'm a bit shallow because of that, a bit of a Pollyanna, but, well, there you are.

(Another of the sculptures on that site: Wasps and rotting fruit remind me a lot of this book from my childhood.