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Public Art and its relation to subsequent Public Art - Charging Bull vs. Fearless Girl
DoctorArch
CurmudgeonRegistered User regular
CurmudgeonRegistered User regular
This morning had an interesting article in the Washington Post (link) about the "Fearless Girl" sculpture allegedly distorting the "Charging Bull" sculpture on wall street.
I posted an abbreviated version of this in chat:
@RMS Oceanic
@Hakkekage
@Drez
So what do you think?
With hopes of dispensing the “perfect antidote” to the stock market crash of 1987, Italian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica spent two years welding a 7,000 pound bronze bull statue designed to capture the resilience of the American people.
Then last month, on International Women’s Day, a new statue of a symbolically brave “Fearless Girl” stole its spotlight — and, Di Modica says, fundamentally corrupted the artistic integrity of his “Charging Bull.”
As “Fearless Girl” was heralded by many as a symbol for female empowerment, Di Modica doled out sharp criticism, casting the statue as not art, but a publicity stunt by the gender-oriented company that commissioned it.
[Di Modica] said in an interview from his art studio that his protest was not meant to snub the importance of gender equality, but to defend the integrity of his bull.
“I put it there for art,” he told the publications. “My bull is a symbol for America. My bull is a symbol of prosperity and for strength.”
Contrasted with the soft, altruistic characteristics of the bronze girl, though, “Charging Bull” now appears menacing and aggressive.
After reading that Di Modica was upset by “Fearless Girl,” Visbal [Fearless Girl's Artist] told the New York Post she was distressed and praised the sculptor’s artistic abilities as “exceptional.”
“The bull is beautiful, it’s a stunning piece of art,” Visbal told the Post. “But the world changes and we are now running with this bull.”
I posted an abbreviated version of this in chat:
@RMS Oceanic
RMS Oceanic wrote: »
It's fascinating how the context to something can change so dramatically.
For the record, I'm pro-Fearless Girl.
DoctorArch wrote: »
Me too. I also don't like the implications/endgame of the Charging Bull's artist in that public art is harmed by subsequent public art that is installed nearby. The Charging Bull stands on its own, Fearless Girl stands on its own, and the two stand together as commentary.
In other words, tough cookies Charging Bull's artist.
@Hakkekage
There is constant tension between a creator's intent and the ravages of time and society upon your works
I would argue that the original intent of the bull statue had already been corrupted by Wall Street
@Drez
I understand his fundamental point, and I can sympathize with him. Basically, the girl-makers are co opting his original art to produce a new work of art. The girl-makers are explicitly utilizing the bull to construct their message.
But ultimately fuck him. That's too bad and it happens in plenty of other mediums. It's almost a derivative work, albeit one that literally destroys the original work.
So what do you think?
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How dare you make a fucking public art thread KNOWING that my BUSY LIFESTYLE will not allow me to write up the 10 page paper I'm already outlining in my brain
I am disgusted with you
So let me just sum up my basic points: You can never really inoculate your creation from reinterpretation and criticism and Wall St has already changed the meaning of the Bull from whatever vague notion of "American resilience" to "masculine, raging bull running away with the nation's wealth" and if you want to blame someone for corrupting your high-handed intent you should start with Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros, Wells Fargo, Bear Stearns and the Financial District at large where you placed the damn piece
**edited to add more Wall St villains
NNID: Hakkekage
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Women speak up, and dudes get upset that they're now not allowed to be "strong," or "romantic," or "chivalrous," or "manly," because the only thing that matters is how they see themselves, not how their behavior affects anyone else or what the context is.
@Hakkekage I believe in you! :biggrin:
That said, even if I go with a strict death of the artist or its flipside, I can't feel any sympathy for the artist when it's a public sculpture whose feelings have been wounded by subsequent public sculpture.
Wikipedia's entry on FG:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/nyregion/fearless-girl-statue-manhattan.html
Gina Bellafante's full article above
Yes, the thing about art is it lends itself to criticism, which is also art. Art is a conversation as much as it is commentary.
In many ways Fearless Girl could fall victim to Death of the Author as well. I think most people are just going to see the art and not ponder the intent of either artist, just what they think it says now.
There's a plaque affixed to the base
I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and presume that he is more concerned with a positive message being turned in perspective to a negative one. Of course, he made the art public, so commentary on it is absolutely valid.
Reminds of a newspaper cartoon where everything is labeled.
So his intent was already twisted by its location on Wall Street. Might as well twist it again into something more positive.
The only message that currently exists is the bull + girl context. They are now inextricably entwined. That's exactly why the bull-maker is complaining. Because the girl-makers have effectively destroyed his own art by changing the context.
Unfortunately for him, though, my opinion is tough shit. It's a public piece in a public place and all the girl-makers have done is alter the public's perspective of the bull, which is not sacrosanct. If they somehow physically altered the bull, that's one thing. But the bull-maker is effectively arguing that he's entitled not to have the perspective on the meaning behind his bull tainted by a competing work or competing message. And that's the most entitled, brainless nonsense I've ever read.
There is no solution to stock market crashes. They will continue to happen because we are a destructive people. Somebody should stand up to us.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Somebody should!
It's probably not *squints*
McLovin, Hawaiian Organ Donor State Street Advisors
It is almost a pure distillation of what happens when someone says something might be problematic (holding doors open, sexualization in media, etc.): I/it don't mean it that way, it only looks bad if you put it like that, stop making it look bad.
(That said, I don't like the ad part of the statue so I will keep on not knowing what the company behind it is.)
Their #1 investment is Pfizer
#2 is PepsiCo
Obviously she just needs to hand the Bull a nice cold Pepsi
The plaque is also art. I'd say we are pretty much in the middle of a corporate art period in America, where the majority of well recognized recent art is corporate sponsored. Ads are this generation's form of art.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I have literally never heard them brought up except to argue that they shouldn't have installed the statue.
This has always been a problem with art! Art is time intensive, sometimes incredibly material heavy, and highly physically and conceptually skilled work! It needs capital to support! And yet, all the capital for spending on "unnecessary" art is locked up in governments and wealthy corporations or individuals. How can art be subversive and enduring and relevant if the vast majority of the actors with the ability to fund unpredictable exercises in creative products expect an ROI and don't understand a damn thing about art besides its monetary or propaganda value?
Somehow, art has survived. So while I am firmly against a stringent Death of the Author interpretation of art in general, particularly applied to contemporary artistic productions (in all mediums, genres and forms), it is also worth recognizing that the capital support of art and artists does not entirely control the subsequent message, gains and artistic value of the resulting piece
NNID: Hakkekage
It controls it just enough. Doesn't matter though. Independent art is dead. This is the best we're going to get.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Independent art was never really alive
Here's a fanciful mythology about artists that we need to disabuse ourselves of: That they are moved by an almost divine purpose, that art is mere emotional, psychological, or intangible expression crafted into tangible form through the prism of creativity alone
Artists are not deities, and despite the doctrine of "Art for Art's Sake" artists require space, time and even a little goddamn bit of money to create anything at all, much less something important and enduring
The most relevant essay I have ever read on the necessary conditions for great art is Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".
NNID: Hakkekage
Well, that's another argument for universal income. In this case, I have no problem going full Death of the Author on both sculptures.
Mostly because their authors' interpretations are not particularly interesting, and the Bull, by itself, is just boring.
@Drez, the more I think about it the more I'm in agreement with you in that Fearless Girl does not actually have a message without the presence of the bull, and that changes the meaning (whatever that is) of the bull.
But I'm also in agreement with you that because it's a public piece of art in a public place, tough cookies, and unless you're willing to hermetically seal your piece of art where nothing ever can be in proximity to it to alter its message, tough chocolate-chip cookies.
I disagree
because if the bull wasn't there we could have a long conversation about this iteration of a fearless girl and its possible inspiration from another very famous, extremely ubiquitous statuette you may have seen in a museum somewhere
I am referring (of course!) to Edgar Degas' "Little Dancer, Age 14":
Seem similar? If I were just analyzing the Fearless Girl on the aesthetics there is no fucking way I could ignore this bit of art history
Ironically, "Little Dancer, Age 14" is only ubiquitous AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE ARTIST. You probably know Degas mostly as the post-impressionist painter of ballerinas, although he did work more in pastels:
Well, he also made a wax sculpture that was essentially the first mixed-media sculpture. It caused controversy in the art world when it was debuted, not just because of the little girl's impudence, but the fact that the statue was essentially defiled/corrupted with actual ephemeral clothing, and a real ribbon in her hair. It was base, in other words.
There are also issues that modern people like us would consider gross and weird about the statue's provenance, which is that it was based on a real, actual teenage ballerina, that ballerinas in Paris were often exploited young girls (and I mean young) from impoverished families, who were perceived as prostitutes and who were perved on relentlessly by creepy middle to upper class men who would hang around backstage after performances, and Degas himself was likely one of these nasty perverts
But all that aside, Degas did this one wax sculpture and didn't want it replicated. The thing about it is, he was a well known artist and all well known artists are typically surrounding by money grubbing family members. He died, and his estate promptly cast the sculpture in bronze and replicated it to make a profit. And this profit motive largely preserved the work and made it a fixture of many museums worldwide, even though the sculpture was reproduced without Degas' endorsement and served to fill the coffers of his unscrupulous family.
anyway
anyway
i wrote more than I should have but that's why art history is so interesting because there are SO MANY FACTORS
I really have to do a work but I want to note that I may have gotten some details wrong in this historical retelling because I am literally typing from my memories of my semester on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in college like 6 years ago so it's been a while since I studied this topic in particular
NNID: Hakkekage
Proper Sculpture is never really going to become the medium of the common person on the street -- the materials and handling and land needed are, like you said, tied up with people and institutions who have a surplus of resources. The rest of us can jot grouchy poems about Wall Street on a bar napkin and a borrowed ball point pen.
I guess the other question is that if people are going to conglomerate an independent shared sense of the meaning of a public sculpture, how is the new addition going to change the current meaning. The bull has definitely come to be seen as just sort of generically a symbol of capitalist success. "Fearless Girl" is being positioned in opposition to it (is any other read possible given the spatial configuration of the work/s), but with ... kitschy corporate girl power?
Maybe it's just the nature of sculpture and money that the most strident critique of Wall Street we're going to see in bronze in that location is some vaguely-defined second wave feminist marketing gesture intended to celebrate rich board room Murphy Brown shoulder pad type ladies. We're not going to get a life-sized marble of the cleaning lady scrubbing the toilets at State Street Global Advisors.
Re: birth of the reader stuff: I never really found myself musing over what exactly the Medici thought any one work which they commissioned meant to them, but every interview I've seen that quotes Kristen Visbal causes me a knee-jerk skepticism. I can't make myself engage with her own read on the statue because I just think, "Who cares, you jobbed out an advertisement for some bean counters." Clearly the many people taking selfies with the statue are drawing value and happiness from it, but it all seems sort of quixotic to me when viewed adjacent to the back-patting mealy marketing fluff that SSGA emits about it.
If I start interrogating that reaction, I think the root of it is not that fair -- the bronze just doesn't strike me as good enough as an art work to call for a multiplicity of reads or a delving into the valley between the idea-and-check-writing people and the executor-craftsman. As a statue-qua-statue it's a mannequin with a miniature billboard bolted on the ground in front of it. But that's just my critical response which ignores the many people who are pleased to see this little girl in a durable, classic material and what SSGA calls a celebration of leadership, they see as a celebration of the everywoman facing down a freight train of testosterone and money.
I guess it's easier for me to glide past the grubby details of money and power and intent when they've all been obscured by the dust of history and the artist has been elevated to part of the canon. When the sane phenomenon is happening in my own culture right in front of me I'm abruptly skeptical. I'm not sure which of the two responses is fairer.
The way this is done now is the way research is done now - with some sort of profit motive on the part of the company, in this case State Street Global Advisors, the world's third largest asset manager. The installation is the front page feature of their website. That's the difference from before; the mandate of the acknowledgement and the business plan of the art.
It's not evil; it's just the natural evolution of a field with an insufficient disinterested public endowment.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It may still have meaning without the bull, but does it have a message? We're discussing the validity of the bull-maker's arguments, right? He's talking about his message being tarnished by the inclusion of the fearless girl. Which is correct, because it is. Both the bull-maker and the girl-makers have messages to convey. Whether or not these statues mean anything to you anyone devoid of this context is different than whether or not they have still contains a sensible message.
Though I will say that I slightly disagree with myself. If they now took the bull away, the default message is: the fearless girl stood her ground against the charging bull...and won. But that message would only exist in the context of the bull being removed and the girl remaining.
If the bull ever existed and the girl was placed there, it would have had a different message perhaps. Or no message. Whether or not it has meaning and what that meaning is is, to me, a different question.
You are correct that the "appropriate" lens with which we should view the sculpture and even our valuation of it--as a monetary investment, as an advertising creation, a cynical PR stunt, or as a cultural piece--is difficult to sort out when you're in the thick of it, and not viewing it several decades or centuries removed. That is because the question of "who profits/whose ox is getting gored" is still very much a salient issue, particularly in our capitalist society, and even more particularly in the extremely capitalist vortex of downtown Manhattan
Still, I think that the present present politics gets a symbolic boost from the presence of the statue, even if you don't think it's "good enough" (by what metric, though?), even though the actors who made it happen are cynically gaining monetary value (and therefore power, in our society) from exploiting the miasma of anodyne feminism that is finally penetrating american culture at large. It may not be a game changer, but on net, I think it has positive value that outweighs its filthy corporate origin story even if there is a backlash once it becomes popular to hate what is beloved, as the cycles of these types of things tend to go.
I also think it is, causally, a good sign of a culture change in corporate culture, even if it is not exactly the type of feminism that is intersectional or addresses the largest cohort of feminist concern. If some hackneyed corporate juggernaut eyeing its bottom line thinks it is profitable to pay a little more than lip service to diversity as a value, even if it is limited by its own corporate idea of diversity, then that means the historic toxicity of feminism is giving way to a cultural balance of power where it is a positive and profitable thing to celebrate women and to do it publicly and with a decent amount of money behind it. It's a bit chicken and egg, but on net I think it has positive value.
Not to mention the fact that the negative responses from wall street bros are revealing in their own way, which is purely for my political satisfaction
NNID: Hakkekage
One not esily spotted it seems. Like I said, if it's meant as an ad it ain't great. All I see is a girl facing a bull.
The plaque actually says: BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE
Independent mass art, or art for money sure. Those have never really been independent. But there is actually an explosion of independent art now that is people making something for their own or others enjoyment without the consideration of payment. It shouldn't affect how we view the artist-as-job, but it does exist, and I'd argue that it exists more now than at any other time in history.
If that's what you think a message is then why does it matter to you what the message of the girl on its own is supposed to be
Regardless of what it's supposed to be, what is it actually? Well, that's where the art makes you think, as people like to say about art. What does it make me think of, devoid of context and absent its superfluous little caption? The defiance and strength of girls in general. That little girls are brave and strong. Why does it need a male icon to square off against to have that message? I don't think it does. So I don't think that the bull being there is required to take a message away from the sculpture. It might have more impact and power because the bull is there, but if it were placed in Central Park rather than the Financial District, I think it would still have a message, albeit less political relevance.
NNID: Hakkekage
But where does the artist have the space and time to have this luxury? Where do independent, prolific tumblr artists come from? It is true that the cost of distribution and reproduction of visual art has never been lower, which lowers the barrier for less intensive investment in creative production. But why is that space there in the first place? Is it only the medium of technologically-based art where this is the case? Isn't there an upfront investment in technology and the time to learn the systems? If a Wacom tablet breaks and there is no money for replacement, does the art for art's sake production cease?
There is always a cost. Sometimes it is hidden and sometimes it is shifted onto another balance sheet but there is always a cost to produce art even if remuneration is not expected or desired.
NNID: Hakkekage