Sam zell's weird art

8.17.23

I was visiting Michigan, and a buddy of mine (who shall remain anonymous for this story) has been working for the University of Michigan in a capacity that overlaps with the Natural History Museum. Until recently, that museum was housed in a building that I and many, many Michigan natives loved dearly as kids. It was a small but stately museum, big to a kid and cozy to an adult, with a lot of handmade displays. It was a magical place, but this isn’t about that.

My buddy had done some work in the old Museum building, which has since been turned into administrative offices. I went to visit him, and he was like “I’m allowed to just walk around here – I kinda want to see what they’ve done to the place.” Reader, I did too.

The place was abandoned even though it was like two in the afternoon, and the high-end-Best-Western vibes that had scoured our fond memories from the building seemed even eerier for it. We were about done, somewhat defeated by the antiseptic blandness of it all, and we were leaving when I pointed at a small sculpture? figurine? just…sitting on a side table in an otherwise impossible-to-notice waiting room.

We… could not figure out what we were looking at. We were thrown off even before my buddy was like… “It plugs in. It has a button.

Imagine our… feelings? More like a sense of smelling burning machine oil in our own brains? When this happened when we set it running.

We had to deal with this hanging contextless in our brains for a good 24 hours before we could track down some explanation for this. A calypso song about international monetary policy. With some sort of buff-Ice-King as Atlas?

As it turns out, real estate tycoon Sam Zell, a sour old viper by all accounts, made one of these each year for New Years, on his own dime. To complain. To his friends. About economic policy.

Brain has never been the same, really.

Here’s more of them. Sam Zell, you suck, your “art” sucks, but it’s… a spectacle to behold.