Quote:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”--Martin Luther King

Friday, August 2, 2013

Shoot the Muralist!

Because you're dying to know, I'll tell you my thoughts on the new Football Psyops Center at the University of Oregon.

(This isn't a statement about what football is or isn't relative to academia. That is another issue, and frankly I am tired of it. If  people gave a fuck about education in this country it would be less expensive than it is now. In any case, I believe you get out of education the effort you put into it; if that means being an autodidact or coming up empty, so be it.)

The building is a $70 million abomination, albeit a beautiful abomination, at least on the outside, where its lines are superb.  In that regard it is a magnificent work of art.

But that is where its beauty ends and, unfortunately, poor taste takes over.  Because I don't believe football was ever designed to be a frilly thing, the frills inside this building are comical.

On the inside the building is a garish travesty that highlights the bad taste often associated with ostentatious displays of wealth and fashion.  Think of all the assembly-line paintings you'll find inside the corporate offices of a multinational insurance company, where the receptionist wears a beehive coif and the CEO looks like Donald Trump in a bad tie.

It's like that.

Its interior has the quality of  a badly curated museum.  Its tawdry affectations betray an empty-headed consumerism, kitsch, and paint-by-numbers design.

Striving for edginess, it came out mundane.

Even the rugs are ugly.

If I were the architect I'd be pissed because a team of idiotic interior designers ruined my perfectly beautiful masterpiece.  At least he didn't acquiesce to placing a big yellow O on the facade, though I'm sure somebody would have thought that a good idea.

The building is overkill, but it is overkill in ways that you may not appreciate. College football as a corporate endeavor entered the pantheon of excess long ago.  With that comes the misbegotten hubris associated with this building, the equivalent of a Napoleon Complex.

It's silly.

"Over-the-top" isn't a good enough phrase for this stinker.

If I didn't like football, i.e., care for the game rather than its accouterments, I'd pooh-pah the whole deal, like many critics indeed have.

In fact I am likely not alone thinking this--the chances are Oregon's football team, coddled as it is, will forget to come to play a few times this season.

The first time a team comes into Eugene and dresses on the bus before slipping out of Autzen with an upset because a few Oregon players couldn't pull themselves out of the players' lounge in time for kickoff--that'll be the day we acknowledge the truth:

The Oregon Football Psyops Center is a joke, and the over-marketing of the Oregon brand is embarrassing.


TS

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