This week on The Disclaimer, WMSE's weekly culture roundtable with the station's Ryan Schleicher, Milwaukee Record's Matt Wild and I, we're being buzzkills about a grassroots effort to bring Pabst Blue Ribbon home to Milwaukee. The feel-good campaign has attracted plenty of media coverage, but is it remotely feasible? Are a few thousand digital signatures and the promise of symbolic stock enough to return major manufacturer to the city? Do we even need to answer that silly hypothetical?
Then we assume our usual positions as the conversation turns to an Urban Milwaukee post about eyesore "plop art," with Ryan and Matt calling for a higher curatorial standard for public installations, and me offering my usual insistence that public art is an important asset regardless of whether art snobs think it's ugly or not. (Not included in the audio of this conversation: Ryan's face turning very red as I disagreed with him on this one). And finally we offer our postmortem on MilwaukeeHome's SXSW stage, and voice our frustration that organizers fell into some of the very traps they were warned about repeatedly (including by us, when they were on our show). It's almost as if people don't listen to us.
Give the episode a stream below.
