'Oh, back that shit up, they got SMILEY FACES!' by Kara
Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:14 AM

Again. I'm gonna link this once or twice more in the rant itself for those who can't figure out how to click banners. After that, I'm gonna trust you kiddies to spread the word on your own. Tell everyone. Like, everyone. Tell your parents. Surely they'd be interested.

So on the William & Mary campus, there's this odd geometric sculpture named Oliver. No, seriously. I thought that was just a nickname the students had given it (someone once informed me that its real name was 'Flight'), but it is, in fact, the actual name of the piece. I can't see as there's a photo available of it, sadly, but it was also nicknamed the Inside-Out Anus, if that helps at all.

I'm not a fan of modern art; Oliver is the most benign thing I saw in the general vicinity of the Muscarelle museum short of classical exhibits going through, and I developed an odd attachment to the big fella during my time there. (I think everyone did.) A big part of it was likely that no one attempted to explain the deeper meaning of the sculpture to me, if indeed it has one, so I was never inclined to laugh at it.

Now, if you were to go in and look at some art projects ... that's different. I have a dim memory of a ballerina sculpture made of coat hangers. Which is at least interesting until you bear in mind that it was a ballerina hanging from a noose. Disgruntled dance student after switching majors? I'unno.

A friend of mine once asked me to take part in a piece of 'performance art' she was doing for her senior project, and I recall it basically involved the three of us who lived down the hall from her doing shit choreography that she came up with on the fly. I'm not insulting her -- she basically informed us that she couldn't be arsed to work too hard on it, and she'd just make up some stupid shit and come up with an interpretation to appease her adviser once the time came. It ended up being something about the commercialisation of society via the virus that is the mass media or some shit.

She got an A.

I thought of all this while assembling the last two panels. Oh, college.

If you have been, why don't you?