Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

Spoonbridge and Cherry

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Tuesday, 18th July 2006

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Inspired by the National Geographic Photo of the Day last week, I went looking for Minneapolis’s Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. Unfortunately something got lost in translation.

The story wasn’t much better on Windows Live Local, or Yahoo! Maps Beta who both use exactly the same image (the traffic on the roads is identical), but interesting to see how differently the other services handle compression of the images. Google actually looks pretty poor in comparison to both of the others.

Anyway, I was disappointed not to be able to see it better, so here’s the giant spoon and fruit courtesy of National Geographic.

Thanks to National Geographic and Norton Lam.

10 Responses to 'Spoonbridge and Cherry'

  1. Ron Vogel says:

    Hooray for Claes Oldenburg. Perhaps a megapost of his works would be in order – looks like I have a diversion for my lunch hour. ;)

  2. koen says:

    Oh if only you were the Ron Vogel! (sfw) ;-P

  3. Ron Vogel says:

    I’ve been asked before. As a web designer, on interviews I’ve had to be very specific about pointing people to my portfolio web site. And still have had folks show the VPs the wrong one.

  4. Russell says:

    Cool. Pity you are in violation of copyright in
    having an image of this sculpture on your website.

    Walker Art Center does not permit anyone to show images of the
    Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van
    Bruggen for any use. This includes sales for editorial.

  5. Esme says:

    Russell, it’s irrelevant what the Walker Art Center allows — American copyright law is very clear that copying small parts of a work (like thumbnail images) for editorial and educational uses is Fair Use. Copyright maximalists like to make all sorts of absurd claims about what you cannot do, but they are rarely supported by fact.

  6. Nate Solas says:

    Actually, the Walker absolutely allows photography of works in the Sculpture Garden – after all, it’s a public space! – but it must be non-commercial in nature. We even have a Flickr pool devoted to snaps people have taken in the Garden. There’s a bit more information in a blog post announcing the pool, if you’re interested.

  7. Alex says:

    Thanks for clearing that up Nate!

    We have however previously featured Atomium in Belgium, where a similar situation apparently exists. One which prevented us from including a picture of Atomium in our book.

  8. russ says:

    the spoon cherry thing appears briefly in the movie “Aurora Borealis” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387037/locations)

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