James Best

Submitted 2025

"I call this design 'The Pollution of Images'. It is a pastiche of Rene Magritte’s famous painting: 'The Treachery of Images', which featured a painting of a pipe and the words 'This is not a pipe' in French beneath it. In my design, I depict a fish smoking a discarded cigarette with the words 'This is not a joke' in French beneath it; the ‘joke’ here being the blatant absurdity of a fish smoking a cigarette. Like Magritte’s painting, the obvious meaning is that an image merely depicts a thing rather than being the thing itself. There is a second meaning to my design. 'This is not a joke' also means that water pollution, here represented by the smoking fish, is not a matter to be taken lightly"

City record

Object: #42
Status: CURRENT
Inlet: {00B0E4E4-4F88-4AB9-AF25-C5DFADDA58EA}
Location: 43.55519, -96.72666
Source: SF GIS layer 56

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