planetdan

Tuesday, October 06, 2009 :::

My favorite souvenir.

Right along the Grand Canal in Venice is Peggy Guggenheim's house, which since her death in 1979 has been turned into a museum. Peggy was an eccentric heiress who collected modern art and hung out with hip artists and wild celebrities. I imagine her house to be like Studio 54, only decades earlier and with less cocaine.

On the trip we visited to the museum and I thought it was slightly disappointing, but she did have a couple of nice Magrittes and this stunning sculpture by Marino Marini in her backyard, facing the canal for the whole world to see as they float by:

Originally, the pointy metal phallus was designed to be detachable, so that one could remove it before parties if one didn't want to offend one's more conservative guests. Of course, someone eventually stole the removable "piece" and so they had to replace it with a more permanent one. But I like to imagine that the bronze ding dong disappeared during one of Peggy's later debaucherous Hollywood parties, and that perhaps Dennis Hopper or Christopher Walken or even Jack Nicholson has the thing resting on his bookshelf as we speak.

So even though you can no longer take any of it home with you, the sculpture's history is still worth remembering. Luckily, it's also available in T-shirt format, with all formally detachable parts still in tact:

I think this represents planetdan very well. Thoughtful and expressive, yet just a teeny-weeny bit subversive.

*I can't stopping looking at my weird chin in that picture. I shouldn't have cropped it so weird. It looks like an extra elbow or something.

::: posted by dan at 9:51 PM :: [ link ] :: (2) comments

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2 previous comments:

Oh, y'all just jealous.

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dan, at 9:39 AM

From the angle of the picture..it kinda looks like he's sitting on a giant phallus. Or maybe I just have a sick mind. Ha.

-Kylee

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Anonymous, at 8:54 AM

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