🎶 OH, OH SAY, CAN YOU SEE:
—A NAME-SAKE! Inquiry into Dalí’s The Broken Bridge and the Dream, the Freighter DALI, and the Collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge
Yes. The container ship that rammed and destroyed the “Oh say can you see. . . ” Francis Scott Key Bridge spanning Baltimore Harbor was named after the surrealist painter extraordinaire, Salvador Dalí.
Life is strange if one truly observes it, and Dalí saw that strangeness and rendered it in paint. We confess that much of his oeuvre does not make us feel especially good. It is too grotesque; too much like life overly contemplated.
We prefer his more affirmative works, such as The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus — a painting, incidentally, now out of stock as a jigsaw puzzle we unsuccessfully sought. That canvas aspires upward. It cheers us. We believe art should sometimes serve as an antidote to existence rather than merely mirror its deformities. The bizarre already surrounds us in abundance. Call us Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm if you wish, but civilization occasionally requires images that encourage rather than unravel it.
And yet there goes Dalí, prophetically painting The Broken Bridge and the Dream decades before a container ship named after him mangled a real bridge in Baltimore Harbor. We suspect Salvador himself would have appreciated the poetic symmetry of the affair. One hesitates to call the catastrophe “ironic,” considering how eerily the event rhymes with his imagery — however much the bridge itself was made of iron.
Few know another vessel was reportedly commissioned alongside the DALI bearing the name CEZANNE. We await with some apprehension the cultural message that freighter may someday deliver. Will it arrive as muted, washed-out, and curiously overrated as much of Cézanne’s work?
—Arthur Phärtze, Aesthetic Interpreter for the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Newsletter
Believe It Or Not It:
A Salvador Dalí painting looks oddly similar to the Dali-caused Key Bridge collapse
COUNCIL-OF CONCERNED-CONSERVATIONISTS…..Between Jest And Earnest….. 
Leave a comment