Just reblogs over here

*head in hands* FUCKING SEWARD JOHNSON

You have triggered the rage within me, so now you will ALL be treated to an outside-the-readmore screed about SEWARD GODDAMN JOHNSON. 

I don’t normally attack artists because a) it scares my friends who are artists (I love you all, you are beautiful, don’t be afraid) and b) honestly most artists don’t deserve the level of vitriol I’m about to employ. I want you all to remember that the seething hatred I feel for Seward Johnson is driven in large part by class consciousness. 

But not entirely. So let’s begin. 

First what you have to know is that Seward Johnson is a “sculptor”. If you google “seward johnson sculpture” you’ll get an idea of his work, most of which is terrible. I feel okay calling his work terrible because he is also the scion of the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, so he has all the money he needs and could step back, do his art for funsies, and let people with actual talent or two original thoughts in their heads exhibit their art, but he doesn’t, he forces his terrible art on all of us. 

The reason I harbor such animosity towards Seward Johnson is that he has been exhibiting on Pioneer Plaza (that area north of the DuSable Bridge) for almost a decade now, and when I worked in the north loop I had to walk past his art every day. It was bad enough when the sculpture was American Gothic, rendered without talent or meaning into three dimensions and provided with luggage. 

How very fucking dare you, you talentless hack

These things are sculpted out of what amounts basically to styrofoam painted in rubberized/weatherized paint, so they are fragile, and tourists were constantly climbing on Farmer’s shoes and falling into them when they found out it wasn’t the cheap but supple fiberglass you would expect of a tacky monstrosity more suited to a roadside motel than the business district of a major metropolitan city. (I would imagine this is why Abraham Lincoln And The Mayonnaise Sandwich has a little fence around it.) 

But American Gothic Motel Attraction was mostly just annoying because it was meaningless, derivative, and CONSTANTLY covered in gawkers getting in everyone’s way. 

Additionally, Seward Johnson’s sculptures on the Plaza are very popular photo spots for tourists, who carry lots of cash and are constantly distracted, which means beginning with The Assault On American Gothic it became a very popular spot for pickpockets. Which means members of our staff, who had nothing to do with this mess, got pickpocketed as collateral damage about once a week during the exhibition of…. 

Forever Marilyn.

SEWARD JOHNSON GO FUCK YOURSELF

This is a very famous image of Marilyn Monroe which is horrifying for the following reasons that Seward Johnson appears not to have understood nor cared about:

a) The day this was shot, on an open set with people leering at her all day, her husband, professional athlete and dirtbag Joe DiMaggio, found out about the filming. Rather than comfort his wife, who had been through some shit already that day, he became angry she’d been showing her panties in public and beat her so badly the neighbors called the police on him. Joe DiMaggio also go fuck yourself. 

b) IT’S IN A MOVIE INFAMOUSLY SET IN NEW YORK. To quote a local newspaper, “Did Chicago lose a bet?”

c) Yes, you can look up and see her panties. While this is juvenile, it’s not nearly as juvenile as the literally thousand of photographs I angrily photobombed of some douchebro from Fuckville Middle America in a backwards baseball cap standing between her legs with his face tilted upwards and his tongue out. 

Oh and btw before it was unveiled it looked like this: 

For literal days, before it was installed, she had a bag over her head. The post is no longer available but in July of 2011 I posted up about it the day I discovered it: 

Sam: OH L, I am about to come upstairs so we can talk about the Lawn Ornament.L: OH MY GOD SHE LOOKS LIKE SHE’S ABOUT TO BE THROWN IN THE TRUNK OF A CAR.

SHE HAS A PLASTIC BAG OVER HER HEAD AND TIED TIGHT AROUND HER NECK. And you can’t see it in that picture but the rope is also wrapped around HER LEGS.

We’re torn between “Marilyn Monroe, Kidnap Victim” and “Marilyn Monroe: Tragic Death By Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation”.

In any just world, there would be a trap door between her legs and everyone who tried to do the upskirt shot would fall into a pit where they would be forced to give five dollars to women’s shelters before they were allowed to leave. THAT would have been interesting art. 

Sidebar, both as contrast and because I love it: Marilyn left a few years ago and was briefly replaced by a refreshing and beautiful piece called The Watch, by Hebru Brantley. The Watch was playful and interesting and didn’t have a single upskirt. Hebru Brantley is a wonderful artist in his own right, but he was also a welcome breath of fresh air after Johnson’s mediocre tribute to sexual assault. 

The Watch was a temporary installation, however, and eventually along came Abraham Lincoln Approves Of White Men. 

It is an unfortunate coincidence that Confused Closeted Republican there is wearing khakis and a white shirt, the new uniform of the alt right, and it’s also coincidence that this is facing Trump Tower, but it’s not exactly helping Seward Johnson’s cause that he chose the blandest outfit possible for Paean To Confused White Bread. The sculpture is meant to be Lincoln, the darling of Illinois, welcoming a visitor to our fair city, but it sure does look like fresh meat is about to get a free trip to Boys Town with the Sixteenth President of the United States. 

This is what I mean when I say Seward Johnson lacks not only skill but also understanding: he clearly didn’t know that Lincoln’s sexuality is under enough debate to have its own wikipedia page, and he either didn’t know or didn’t care that Marilyn Monroe was nearly killed by her husband for shooting that scene. All he cares about is image and he’s bad at reproducing image. That is not a well-executed rendering of how human beings are, and dynamically speaking it’s boring. If he were good at visuals or if he had something meaningful to say I would be less angry, but he is mediocre at best and the statements his sculptures make are banal pap if they make any at all. 

But he is rich, and I guess either he likes Chicago or he’s got blackmail on Sam Zell, owner of Pioneer Plaza, so he gets to spatter his hideous, meaningless masturbation in my city. And lest you think Seward Johnson got here on his own merits, Forever Marilyn, now on tour from coast to coast, is owned by The Sculpture Foundation, which is heavily subsidized by Seward Johnson. He basically founded a nonprofit to ensure his work gets toured around and publicized and to ensure that if no museum wants it, it has a place to go to die (Palm Springs, CA). 

Day THREE of filling this with aro and/or ace characters

🧡💛🤍🩵💙

we see less than one percent of these relationships. we’re not seeing them develop over the course of weeks, months, years like other shows. we get one day in which we’re dividing our attention between over a dozen characters.

dana in season one keeps reiterating that robby is being weird. we see mckay on a day her ankle monitor is malfunctioning and her shitty ex is admitted. we see frank on the literal worst day of his life when his career is crumbling and his addiction is reaching a fever pitch. we see heather on a day she’s happy to be pregnant and then devastated to have a miscarriage.

with the exception of dennis, victoria, mel, and trinity, we are walking into a party that’s been raging for a while. loyalties have been established previously (examples include garcia wanting to keep langdon’s secret even though she was attracted to trinity, heather confiding in dana before robby, robby and jack feeling they can almost exclusively rely on each other). we also only see these four new people when they are unsure and untethered. we’re getting a first impression of them at the same time every other character is.

so yeah, trinity’s relationship with the rest of the ER is going to be different from someone who had been a part of it for literal years (even if he stepped away for a while). mel isn’t going to have the same dynamics as samira and mckay who are coming up on two (+) years working together. robby’s going to be different with dennis compared to langdon because he doesn’t know him well enough to have resentments yet.

just because we’ve only known these characters since that day in september, doesn’t mean that they’re all starting at ground zero with one another. things may seem “unfair” to the viewer being dropped in on this, but there’s so much context we’ll never know and the writers purposely exploit this vagueness to add a moral ambiguity to interactions. it’s good writing for you to not quite know who’s right and who’s wrong, and it largely comes down to what you personally project onto these character we know next to nothing about.

like maybe frank and robby weren’t as close as frank thought, maybe robby encouraged a familial relationship and then pulled back as it got harder. maybe mckay would’ve never overtly threatened her ex’s girlfriend if she wasn’t at her whits end that day. maybe garcia was being cruel about denying the fireworks date or maybe she’s reiterating what trinity told her prior about their relationship.

this show will make you crazy if you cannot accept the moral ambiguity and uncertainty. the viewers must allow for multiple interpretations of the character’s actions. there is not a comprehensive canon to rely on which makes the fan art amazing, but also means there’s a wide chasm between what is known to be true, and what you feel can be assumed.

i want him to volunteer to take on cases with her and validate her choices. i want him to teach her the way he should have in season 1, and i want him to defend her when she makes a mistake. i want him to make a joke and look for her reaction, because he doesnt want her to hate him anymore. i want him to miss the friendship they could have had this whole time. i dont want him to grovel at her feet and follow her around like a lost puppy, but i want him to see that even now, in all her spite and anger - she is not his enemy, and she never was.

and i want santos to resist - at first. i want her to be agitated that he’s hovering over her, like he’s waiting for her to fuck up. i want her to question him, why he keeps watching her and sucking up to her. i want to see her question why he’s being so… strange. almost nice. maybe. i want to see her turning to whitaker, who shrugs and says that maybe he’s trying to make amends. i want her to turn to javadi, who says that she should just let him in and see what happens. she cant hold a grudge forever, after all. santos wants to argue, but she gets dragged away before she can bite back.

then, at the end of the day, when they’re worn out and tired and leaning against the wall in the ambulance bay, i want langdon to make a joke that santos laughs at. she’s delirious and tense, but she laughs a genuine laugh, and a mountain of tension drains from langdon’s shoulders. he tries to double down on the joke, but she tells him not to push it. she still smiles, though. a very small, exhausted, slightly agitated smile, but a smile nonetheless. langdon tells her that he’ll see her tomorrow, and santos just says “see ya” in response. langdon considers this a monumental win. santos groans dramatically and puts her head in her hands.

While it's nice that many creators have become neutral or even supportive of fan works (like Noah Wyle... "You got the calves perfect"), everyone has a limit, somewhere maybe, where they get tired of seeing their intended nuances not come across perfectly to every single fan. Everyone (and their families and partners) also has a limit, somewhere, where they can't deal with strangers online headcanoning how your naked body looks. And indie authors have expressed this before: if a creator publicly interacts with fanmail or a fanwork that too-closely guesses an upcoming plotline, there's suddenly a potential issue of copyright and having to prove plagiarism didn't happen. (Imagine being handed a great potential plot point and knowing you now can't do anything with it!)

You can see most easily the toxicity that crops up when the boundary between creator and fan gets blurred, and how that really hurts the story being told, in smaller works like the webcomic OMG Check Please when the major antagonist's character arc got completely scrapped due to fan and creator interactions. Or you can look at any number of streamers in the MCYT ecosystem becoming uncomfortable - or extra profit driven - due to fan behavior around shipping, and that causing abrupt tone shifts in character dynamics. In a larger sense, many fans walked away from BBC Sherlock and later seasons of Supernatural with the feeling that the show runners were disgusted with shipping behaviors and their fanbase, and went out of their way to craft their stories to punish those fans.