I saw this week’s picture and thought “oh no, there’s another one?” By which I meant another of these…

I’m talking about “Cloud Gate,” the monstrosity that sits in Chicago’s Millennium Park (which, if I’m not mistaken, is what Grant Park used to be) and is now the symbol for Chicago. I think it’s an ordinance that every pictorial of Chicago must include a picture of what many Chicagoans (particularly those of us in the diaspora) refer to as “the d**n bean.”

It isn’t as though Chicago hasn’t been the victim of ugly outdoor art before.

This arrived from Pablo Picasso in August 1967, a piece of sculpture requested by the architects of the Daley Center (the building behind this) and it caused an almost immediate furor amongst Chicagoans who decided the name of it should be What The Hell Is That? They finally got around to…