We’re starting to feel like Pained Pamela is following Bub around, doomifyng his lighthearted stories. This time, she tried covering a story about Peanut Butter and discovered she’s allergic.
Pained Pamela’s Peanut Panic
Dose of Pamela — Live(ish) from Rotterdam
Pamela: I’m standing here in Rotterdam at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, where more than 800 pounds of peanut butter have been spread across the floor in tribute to the late Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers.
Eight hundred pounds.
Enough peanut butter, we are told, for approximately 15,000 sandwiches.
Which raises the obvious question: Is this art, or is Western civilization finally asking to be scraped off a shoe?
Now, museum officials insist this installation is “conceptual,” which is art-world language for you are not allowed to ask, “WTF?””
The piece is called Pindakaasvloer, or Peanut Butter Floor, first created in 1969. And I have to say, standing here now, ankle-deep in the aroma of institutional Skippy, one feels the full weight of history.
One also feels… slightly… warm.
And itchy.
But let us not be distracted by my rapidly narrowing airway.
Behind me, visitors are being invited to contemplate absurdity, material excess, childhood nostalgia, and the haunting question: creamy or crunchy?
I asked the curator whether this work comments on global hunger.
He said, “Not exactly.”
I asked whether it comments on late capitalism.
He said, “Perhaps.”
I asked whether it comments on the climate crisis.
He said, “Madam, please step away from the exhibit.”
But isn’t that always how doom begins? First they tell you not to step in the peanut butter. Then they tell you not to panic. Then they tell you the sweating and swelling is “visually consistent with your brand.”
I am now attempting to administer my EpiPen while maintaining journalistic objectivity.
This is difficult because my left hand appears to be becoming a baguette.
Still, the symbolism is unavoidable. A museum has turned food into floor. The public has turned catastrophe into content. And I, once again, have turned a routine assignment into a personal catastrophe.
If I do not survive this broadcast, tell my followers I died as I lived: wet, underdressed, poorly prepared, and asking whether this is a metaphor or a fact.
Back to you in the studio, or better yet, anyone with antihistamines.
PLEASE: Before you condemn us for choosing the ridiculously sexy Pained Pamela to be our Dose of Doom reporter, go HERE to learn more about her heartbreaking story. Surely, you would not deny her the right to earn a living.
Alex Bakerloo 