(3dom [CC / Flickr])
They splashed on his installation. I scrolled through three whole screens of the review before going back to the top to read it word by jagged word.
An empty exercise in vacuous grotesquerie was what their reviewer called my rival’s work. A couple of paragraphs later, it was the most pointless use of a traffic cone since a heavily bevvied student planted one on a litter bin thinking it was a statue of some unlamented benefactor.
I had to wipe the toast crumbs off my screen at that one. I couldn’t fault the reviewer’s perceptiveness; she’d seen straight through his attempts to make a pile of bric-a-brac look like a profound statement. Where I can and do fault her is in her grasp of what was worth the effort of reviewing. I swiped through all of the pages but once again, there was not a word on the installation I’d spent the last six months assembling.
I would forego sugar in my coffee for a week if it would earn one acerbic metaphor, but the reviewer who expended hundreds of words on misplaced traffic cones hasn’t even bothered to visit my lemonade bottles and light bulbs.
It’s their loss.
Depends on whether they like lemonade bottles!