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Subtlety has no place in Times Square, which may be why a 65-foot hot dog is returning there later this month.
Beginning July 21, "Hot Dog: The Second Serving" will once again stretch across Duffy Square as part of Times Square Arts. Brooklyn artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw's giant frankfurter installation runs through August 8, and yes, the weiner will point straight into the air and blast off confetti every day again, too.
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The original sculpture debuted in 2024 as an oversized love letter—and side-eye—to New York, consumer culture and the American Dream. The new version keeps the familiar ingredients (bun, pink hot dog, mustard, and hydraulically powered showers of confetti) but leaves a darker aftertaste.
“The hot dog returns in an altered form to reflect an altered nation," Catron and Outlaw said in a statement. "As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, we found ourselves returning to questions that animated the original project: spectacle, patriotism, celebration, and power. Symbols persist. Myths persist. Their meanings shift. Two years after its initial appearance, the sculpture returns to a country that is both familiar and changed, revealing new tensions within a symbol that once seemed self-evident."
If that sounds like a lot to ask of a hot dog, well, it is Times Square, a neighborhood that practically invented turning commerce into performance and performance into commerce. A 65-foot frankfurter interrogating American identity somehow feels perfectly at home.
“Times Square has always been a place where America puts itself on display for the world, and there's no better stage, and no better moment than the nation's 250th birthday, to ask what we're actually celebrating. Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw hold that spectacle up to the light, with humor, with scale, and with real provocation,” said Anna Starling, Director of Times Square Arts, in a statement.
Whether you come for the public art, the political commentary or the opportunity to get a picture standing beneath a colossal frankfurter getting showered with confetti, "Hot Dog: The Second Serving" promises one of the summer's most delightfully absurd photo ops. Like New York itself, it's loud, impossible to ignore and more complicated than it first appears.