Jeff Koons and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are still working on putting up outside the museum's entrance what may be the most expensive museum commission ever. It's a life-sized replica of a steam train that will actually emit sound and steam, suspended from an actual construction crane, and it's supposed to look like this.

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This morning I was out visiting Kristen Ramirez, the artist-in-residence on the Fremont Bridge, and she had in the bridge tower with her a pamphlet from the Seattle Arts Commission's 1991 project In Public: Seattle, which brought together a group of local and far-flung artists to do temporary and permanent installations funded by the percent-for-art money that was generated by Seattle Art Museum's then-new Robert Venturi building.

Turns out Chris Burden's proposal was to hang a real trawling vessel from the front of the museum like a trophy. Evidently local artist Cris Bruch, who also had a project in the exhibition (involving a weird unfinished roadway that looks like it went right into the water), was the one who drove Burden around looking for vessels.

Burden's dangling fishing boat never materialized. Would it have been more interesting than Koons's train? We'll never know. I wonder what they talked about in the car, though...