SeattleaEUs famous gum wall to be cleaned

Silvia Lim's gum bubble bursts as she records with her phone. Visiting from Sweden, she takes a self-portrait at the the Gum Wall attraction in Seattle's Post Alley. It's her first visit having read about it in a tour guide, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015.

(Alan Berner/Seattle Times/TNS)

There's a lot of things Portland could steal from Seattle that would make ours an even better city: really good dim sum, the water taxi, men throwing fish for the entertainment of the public, diversity. But there is one thing that we could crib from our northerly sister that would only greatly decrease the greatness of our great metropolis. And that is a gum wall.

According to a Facebook event posted by Ronin Living Art Studio and discovered by The Portland Mercury, the gallery is looking to create a gum wall, like the now-removed gum wall that used to mar the niceness of Seattle's Pike Place Market.

This seems like this should go without saying but: no.

No. no. no. no.

Post Alley Wall of Gum, at Pike Place Market, in 2013.

Anyone who experienced the gum wall in Seattle knows it was the absolute worst. Take one of the most disgusting things you can think of: someone else's saliva-softened chewing gum, carelessly discarded on an object (feel it under your desk, try to remove it from your favorite shoes), multiply it by a million and call it a tourist attraction.

That gum wall has been cleaned up because guess what? It was disgusting. Apparently though, like a blob of pure concentrated evil in a sci-fi movie, the gum wall is coming back.

I try not to be prescriptive about what should and shouldn't be considered art. Like, if you want to make a statement about the cloying, false, destructive sweetness of America's throw away consumer culture, fine, make a gum wall.

But it's not fun. It's gag-inducing. It's more Damien Hirst cow head and maggots than Space Needle. The cow head is great to give you of some vague feeling of horror and guilt, but on the street it's a public health hazard. A gum wall is a public health hazard. The Space Needle is fun. Let's get a Space Needle.

Please, dear friends at Ronin Living Art Studio (I call you "friends" because we're all in this together at this point), I implore you: pick another Seattle thing to emulate. Dick's burgers perhaps, or Experience the Music Project (now The Museum of Pop Culture apparently), or a lot more direct flights to better locations. But not this. Anything but this.

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker