allmostrelevant

At the end of Terminal B in the Sea-Tac airport there is some art that consists of a few ladders shooting up from the ground and going into the ceiling. These ladders are like normal aluminum ladders you can buy, except there is glass on the sides that is made to look like rushing water. The hallway leading up to this has a subtle wavy blue streak embedded in the floor that is every now and then adorned with a metallic fish. This leads me to believe that all of this effort and money was put into this… “art” just to make a pun: Fish Ladder. I make a pun and it’s silly and whimsical, but someone spent the money to buy that meticulously transparent project, and it is literally just the same thing; a pun. But not just any pun! It’s an expensive pun; the best kind. Now art just seems like a fish ladder in and of itself. The metaphor being that we’re all swimming upstream against the current, trying to get to the top, and once we do we sell out and our artistic principles die and get washed away with all the money, back downstream, making it harder for those at the bottom who hold fast to artistic principles to swim upstream so they too can sell out.