A prominent New York art critic is slamming the controversial statue of NBA legend Dwyane Wade.
The Pablo Torres Finds Out page shared a clip from the video to X and wrote, “Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic for @NYMag, took a flamethrower to the Heat’s new Dwyane Wade statue. 😭😂”
“That is an absolute (expletive) work of art. It looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. There’s nothing to it other than the pose. He looks like The Rock, he looks white — which is fine with me — but, you know, it has no character,” the critic said. “It has no ambiance. It has no internal scale. It has no feel for its material.”
“It doesn’t look anything like him,” Saltz added in the video, questioning “how much did they pay for it?”
The critic added that he would “pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard.”
According to ESPN, the statue was unveiled outside the Miami Heat’s stadium in late October and quickly was criticized by fans.
The Art Critic Declared That the Dwyane Wade Statue ‘Looks Like Art by Committee’
The podcast shared an NBC News interview with the statue’s artists, who said Wade visited with them four times, approved the statue, and noted that they used a computer to perfect it.
“It looks like art by committee,” Saltz said. “That’s what it is. It looks like art by more than one person with no touch, no hand. Only an idea.”
Saltz conceded that the artists “sincerely wanted to make this realistic.” But he said, “It doesn’t look like anybody.” He noted, “Could they have made something magnificent? Yes, they could. But they could have also made something much worse. It could have been a piece of string tied to a chain . . . that happens as well.”
He added, “So this is a happy medium.”
The YouTube page caption reads, “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.”
Dwyane Wade Defended the Statue, Saying It Doesn’t Have to Look Like Him
GettyDwyane Wade interacts with fans as they visit his statue.
In an earlier interview with ESPN, Wade defended the statue.
“If I wanted it to look like me, I’d just stand outside the arena and y’all can take photos,” Wade told ESPN. “It don’t need to look like me. It’s the artistic version of a moment that happened that we’re trying to cement.”
According to ESPN, the statue is meant to capture a specific iconic Wade moment, that being, “the end of a game against the Chicago Bulls in March 2009, when he made a shot to win at the buzzer of double overtime, hopped up onto a courtside table and yelled, ‘This is my house.’”
“I care, but I don’t,” Wade said, according to ESPN. “The social media world is about opinions. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone, use y’all opinions. Please talk more about us. Talk more about a statue, come on down to see it, take some photos, send some memes. We don’t care.”
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