By Gus Saltonstall
A strangely beautiful Upper West Side bike rack is on display for all to see.
The rack and bike remnants are located on Amsterdam Avenue, between West 74th and 75th streets.
“My thought is that someone did arrange it that way, given the tire through the frame and the gear on top,” Joshua Sills, who alerted West Side Rag to the bike rack, wrote in an email about whether or not he thought it was a purposeful piece of art.
The Rag visited the eye-catching bike rack on Tuesday morning.
“I think it’s just a mutilated bike,” one person walking by, who did not provide their name, said to the Rag.
Another person asked online, “Was this bike struck down by God?”
There is also a yellow sticker on one of the bike parts that reads, “This bicycle has been scheduled for removal after 7 days.”
Abandoned bikes that are missing essential parts, which this one undoubtedly is, are removed by the New York City Department of Sanitation. The city agency needs to be alerted to the damaged bikes, though, by a 311 complaint.
But the question remains.
A carefully crafted piece of art or an abandoned bike?
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It’s there for dogs who get tired of peeing on trees — only the best for UWS dogs!!!
It looks like something you find at Sanford and Son’s. Public art has really deteriorated.
I think it needs a dedicated traffic lane. Gale??
This is not art. This is disgusting to look at. Purely trash.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I do believe that Marcel Duchamp would have approved! FYI: eye-opening exhibition of Duchamp’s work at MOMA, which explains his philosophy about art.
MOMA will buy this for $1million and install it near “Fountain.”
It’s definitely Art, with a capital “A”. It suggests,
to me, total frustration with Life and someone just said , “To hell with it…I’m walking.”
Replace this concept-piece with a fenced-in (protected) live-plant tree pit and an “unadorned” bike rack that matches the fence. Let the piece’s creator take his public sculpture home with him.
It’s an original Bikesy.
Somebody tried, but they didn’t quite get there
I think “beautifully strange” would be more apt. Yet even using the word “beautiful” may be a misnomer. ICK!
Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
it like like a pile of junk to me.
It looks like something Copernicus would had built to measure the distance between galaxies.
Giving it a second thought, I believe you are mischaracterizing this entirely. It is not a “bicycle rack” at all. It is a street sculpture using a bicycle rack as its “base.” But beauty is STILL in the eyes of the beholder. And my eyes see a pile of junk left on a bicycle rack.
It is a monument to the mechanical l genius of the US