Giant Glowing Paintbrush

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Claes Oldenburg, creator of giant public object-artworks, used his 2011 sculpture Paint Torch to call attention to art itself. It's a 93-foot-long paintbrush balanced upward at a 60 degree angle so that it reaches 51 feet into the sky. To do this, the paintbrush had to be anchored 36 feet into the ground. At the tip of its bristles is an orange paint "blip," and on the sidewalk below is a six-foot-high "glob." Both are lit from within at night, which is where the Torch in the title comes from. Oldenburg explained that the glowing paint symbolized Philadelphia's role as torch of American revolutionary liberty.

According to Oldenburg, and contrary to common misperception, the glob on the sidewalk has not fallen from the blip, but rather the blip has been dipped into the glob, and is now raised up to paint the canvas, which is the sky.