There are three bronze rhinoceroses stacked on top of one another at 312 East South Temple, on the frontage of a building owned by Price Real Estate. The bottom rhino stands. The middle one lies across its back, belly up, and the top one balances on the middle one's upturned feet, which is not a thing rhinoceroses do. The piece is called "The Last Three." It depicts Sudan, Najin, and Fatu, who were, at the time it was cast, the last three Northern White Rhinos alive. Sudan has since died.
The sculpture is one of a series the developer Steven Price has installed along South Temple over the past several years, a collection that has included a bronze ostrich, a 15-foot yellow pencil made from a decommissioned Rocky Mountain Power utility pole, and a red sumo wrestler that, according to KSL, a vandal destroyed not long after it went up.
The sculptures sit on private property, and Price, the founder and president of Price Real Estate, bought them the way anyone buys anything. His company biography lists more than a dozen public art installations across Salt Lake County that he personally funded, with more planned.
When the pencil went up in 2022, Price told KSL he wanted the work to "elicit all sorts of different contrasting opinions from viewers," which it has, though mostly from viewers Price will never hear from, because the opinions arrive on foot, at sidewalk level, from people who did not ask to have opinions about rhinos on their way to work.
One viewer Price has heard from, at volume, is Jerry Saltz.
Saltz is the senior art critic at New York Magazine and a Pulitzer winner, and he has spent eight years treating the artists behind the rhinos as his personal example of everything wrong with public art. The couple, Gillie and Marc Schattner, unveiled the original 17-foot version of "The Last Three" in New York's Astor Place in March 2018. Saltz reviewed it the next day under a headline calling it a kitschy monstrosity, wrote that it proved his adage that "95 percent of all public sculpture is crap," compared the stacking to a Vegas acrobatic act, and told readers that liking it meant they had bad taste.
Underneath the insults sat an actual argument that the extinction of a species deserved something better than a selfie backdrop and that hating the sculpture was a way of taking the rhinos seriously. The Schattners answered with an open letter thanking him for the publicity and correcting his description of them as an "ultrawhite couple." Gillie is half Indian. Marc is an Austrian Jew whose family survived the Holocaust.
They went on to install sculptures in what their site now claims are more than 250 cities, and they host Saltz's review on their own website, between the sculpture care instructions and the gift cards. Saltz went on too. In June 2023, he named them the worst two artists in the public sector, and this June, in Sydney for his first Australian talk at the Vivid festival, he photographed himself beside one of their bronzes and tagged them.
What followed, as described Saturday by Shawn Rossiter in 15 Bytes, was a pile-on of thousands of comments the artists called harsh, cruel, and deeply personal, and a public reply in which they said the episode made them question whether to keep making art at all.
Rossiter's piece, which is worth reading, treats the episode as a question about criticism. His answer, roughly, is that the 2018 review argued a position, the 2026 post argued nothing, and a critic's job is the space between cheerleading and trolling. He ends by asking readers what they think of the rhinos on South Temple.
One thing worth noting: Price chairs the Arts and Culture Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the same role he held during the bid, when he picked the one artwork Utah gave the IOC, a Golden Spike replica now bound for the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. The arts program for 2034 is otherwise a nearly blank page until planning begins in earnest around 2030. Which means the man who put the rhinos on South Temple will have a large say in what art two million visitors see when they get here. The critics can post whatever they want.
So we'll end the same way Rossiter did. What do you think?
