Arturo Di Modica has a point
gregfallis.com
gregfallis.com
This is corporate marketing both adeptly using culture war tactics and manipulating them to its own end. They knew that they could put their ad there and appeal to feminists. They knew that anyone who disagreed with its placement, regardless of their actual reason for objection, would be shouted down as sexist, thereby reenforcing the supporters' convictions. They knew that that interaction would generate extensive buzz.
You can either buy into their message or become a target for those that do, but no matter how you engage with it, you end up pushing their message. Whether you're a die hard feminist, or someone who finds this divisive, you are being manipulated by cynical marketers. They've correctly identified the mechanisms of a current social schism, and subverted them.
Regardless of how you feel about the statue, the campaign is simply genius. This is truly art on a next level. The divide of American culture, the cynicism of corporate America and its willingness to stoop to any level, the furious fighting while blind to the real mechanisms at work. This statue may be the perfect representation of America in 2017.
strikingly similar to the pepsi ad team strategy
Di Modica's bull meant one thing to him when he made it. Now it means millions of different things to the people who consider it every day. If he wanted to maintain full control over the meaning of his work, he should have kept it in his private studio and not let anyone look at it without him standing by to explain the piece and answer any questions.
Similarly, Fearless Girl meant something specific to the asset management company that commissioned it, and something else to the artist who sculpted it. But now it takes on new meaning to everyone who encounters it. What it means to any given individual may or may not incorporate any of the intended meaning, and that doesn't make it any more or less valid.
If digging into the origins of the statues helps give them meaning to you, that's great. But most people who encounter them necessarily appreciate them at face value, and that's great too, because deriving meaning from art is intensely personal.
And beyond taking on different meaning to each individual, as time progresses and the world continues to evolve, so too will the symbolic value of any work of art placed into the world. God knows the Charging Bull has taken on a lot of additional meaning to a lot of people since '08. How did Di Modica feel about how that event 'changed the meaning' of his work?
If you don't like a work of art, that's fine. But no one has the authority to tell someone else what it should mean to them.
Which is not completely true from all points of view, if I follow you around swinging my fist a millimeter from your nose, it's still an act of violence.
If I paint a tag on the statue, it's vandalism. If I put up a giant dude swinging a croquet mallet next to the Arc de Triomphe, people who appreciated the monument will be upset. (Or Trump next to Mount Rushmore…or a man exposing himself to the girl between her and the bull)
Sometimes art that is motivated by response to another piece of art is itself timeless, and transcends the original. Sometimes it's just crap.
Recontextualizing is an occupational hazard, if you're a statue, or an artist.
We can debate whether the girl elevates the bull, or disrespects and diminishes it. If it's fine art or crap. And if it falls into that grey area of recontextualizing or vandalism.
Furthermore, works of art - like any communication - depend, in some form, on context. This is an intrinsically fuzzy area, but while it's clearly absurd to let anyone entirely dictate the context, I also feel it's questionable - misleading even - to retrospectively impose context upon them, particularly if that new context serves to misrepresent the original message, and even more so when the new message is so blatantly self-serving without being upfront about it.
Regardless of the personal meaning of art; allowing such deception encourages it, and that undermines our ability to interpret the world around us. It's hard enough without institutionalized deception.
So - fine for the statue to exist; dubious for its advertising nature to be hidden; and definitely unreasonable for it to be allowed to reinterpret others' messages so deceptively.
Is advertising actually self-serving if it isn't upfront about what it being advertised?
This statue is not like a traditional billboard emblazoned with a brand name - the only mention of SHE appears to be on the placard at the foot of the statue. Even then, the mention is ambiguous, as how many people will recognize 'SHE' as a stock tracker rather than just a word with emphasis?
I broadly agree with your sentiment, and I understand there is something discomforting about its origin. However I believe the statue would come across as far more tasteless if SHE were upfront with their branding.
Yes, subliminal advertising is a real thing, and other techniques desperately try to hide the fact that it's an ad. Not sure about this case, it's definitely an interesting one.
All people in this advert's target audience will. If not from the inscription then from the media buzz it has been generating.
Entity A makes a public statement. Entity B makes a public reply.
Public comments are reframed, misrepresented, misunderstood, and recontextualised with varying degrees of honesty and good/bad faith all the time.
I don't think anyone is going to get very far arguing that's not acceptable, because it seems like a straightforward free speech issue.
No one is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre here, or calling for people of a certain race to be rounded up into concentration camps.
It's a political statement about a political statement, and in a free speech context, that's absolutely fine.
Similarly here; just because some people may have a message they should be allowed to proclaim does not mean they should be allowed to (effectively) silence others, nor that they should be able to misrepresent the origins of their message.
I don't think their message is particularly objectionable, but I don't think it's reasonable for it to change the bull's message so severely. Separately I don't think it's healthy for something so context sensitive to be pushed so publicly without proper attribution. Then again, I don't think advertising is good for us, either, so on that front I realize that there's definitely some disagreement.
...First the Mona Lisa's beauty would be diluted then its meaning - the art in it - would be destroyed (not irreparably, you could always take the Mona Lisa out again and put it where it deserves to be - on its own, in the context it deserves).
I love the fearless girl. But the Charging Bull shows the energy of progress, of the economy, of ambition, of growth. Not something I would want anyone to stop.
The advance of the bull's charge means we are all better off, means our children will be better off than we are. It means progress.
...If anything the girl should be riding the bull, pointing her finger forward! Yes a little girl can ride and drive the progress, can lead the charge of progress!
...but she should not be there to stop it. They could have bought an old nazi tank and put her in front of it, and the Fearless Girl would have had exactly the same meaning.
Let the Fearless Girl tell her message. Let the Charging Bull tell its message
Yes, and if that's a lie, the Girl takes on more significance. The moral argument for not diluting the Bull message rests on whether its location and attitude represents its known intentions. If this is instead a mistake or a lie, that message is best disrupted. And that's absolutely a political argument, not an artistic argument, but all the same it IS a significant public argument that's increasingly mainstream.
If we're not better off and our children will be poorer and more desperate than we are, then this Bull is not progress and some form of counter-argument needs to be made. And you can defend the Bull's right to be its own statement (not actually challenged by the Girl) but this doesn't extend to legislating that the Bull's statement must go unchallenged. Even by index funds, selling something ;)
However, now that I know that this fearlessness symbol is actually part of corporate marketing campaign pushing some obscure (at least for the general public, and I don't care how many billions they manage) investment fund, this acquires so many deeper meanings that I actually start liking it a lot. The symbolism of it so rich, it's even better than selling Che T-shirts with slogans "Fight Capitalism" for $39.99. And much more prominent.
Ah, and yes, I completely agree that the meaning is in the eyes of beholder.
You don't even know the name of the investment fund that paid for this statement. Neither do I. The main point obviously wasn't to push the fund, or there would have been a separate statement taking credit.
Surely, but we're not talking about tort lawsuit here. We're talking about art. From art point of view, it doesn't really matter if you drew it on original or on a reproduction. Well, if you are into performance art it kinda does, but that's not relevant here.
> You don't even know the name of the investment fund that paid for this statement.
Ah, but now I do. That's the point.
> The main point obviously wasn't to push the fund
Or was it? And why would I care what the intent was - it's the result that is interesting. When Homer performed his rendering of Iliad, he probably didn't intend to create timeless classic to be studies thousands of years since. He probably was just trying to earn his evening meal. Who cares? The point is not what they wanted to do, the point is what they did. At least to me.
I also had never heard of Di Modica. I'm sure recognition/advertising had nothing to do with his original work or current speaking out.
That's a pretty specific statement to make, even a political one in its own right, and it wasn't 'public', it was one guy with a lot of money and time on his hands. I've seen art critics be pretty scathing about the Bull on the grounds that it's tacky bad art. It's popular as hell: unsurprising and not really the point.
It was never public art. It's exactly the same context as the Girl, and represents its time about as well as the Girl represents 2017, with all her contradictions and sketchy motivations. The symbolism of the Bull is just as deep as the Girl, it's just that the message is wildly different.
By now it pretty much is, whatever the roots of it were. It has been accepted in the culture.
> I've seen art critics be pretty scathing about the Bull
I've seen art critics being scathing about everything. Literally. That's what they do. Name a work of art, and there are dozens of art critics being scathing about it. Too old, too new, too smart, too dump, to tacky, too conservative, too much meaning, too little meaning... take your pick.
> It's exactly the same context as the Girl
Well, now that we know the Girl is an ad for an (underperforming) index fund, I think the context is slightly different. But I agree that it's both deep and meaningful and reflects the zeitgeist.
The girl is sold as representing the strength of women, but in fact it's a secret ad campaign that was put in front of the symbol representing American strength by a global fund. And people (unknowingly) support the ad campaign and react very aggressively to people questioning the ad and call anyone who questions the ad a woman hater.
And people who want to remove the ad don't care about the symbolism, they think things are fine or they don't like uppity women.
Seems like the perfect representation of 2016.
No, that's just what Di Modica told people, presumably to better garner public support. It comes up in the original NYT reporting:
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/16/nyregion/soho-gift-to-wall...
You don't plop a massive bull in the middle of the Manhattan Financial District soon after a market crash to generally represent the "strength and power of the American people." It represents exactly what everyone who sees it thinks it represents.
It's a big jump to that from "Fearless girl".
the bull without the girl retains its strength
The bull in deep space Queens becomes, I dunno, a pair of brass balls attached to a bull? The whole thing is pretty silly no matter how Di Modica feels about it.
In that case, the secondary statue would not have become so symbolic for some (as referenced by current NYC mayor).
>The bull in deep space Queens becomes, I dunno, a pair of brass balls attached to a bull?
I don't think so. It may become detached from the wall street aspect, but it's still a bull ready to charge. It's like saying Michelangelo's "David" loses its meaning if it were moved to a commercial square in Shenzen.
And you may say David is more like the girl in that they're both defiant. However, I think not due to the symbolism behind the David as well as the bull.
I.e. it would become something completely different. There is no parallel to David, David's context is not as closely tied to its location - in fact, the statue is not displayed at its originally intended location.
It wouldn't have represented anything other than a bull, had he not put it there, is what I'm getting at.
Stuff like this really makes me wonder what is going on with gender politics these days. It's a borderline witch hunt, where people are being singled out as "witches" to short circuit public opinion against them.
But it turns out the girl is the result of a marketing campaign by a global advertising corporation for a giant investment fund. That changes everything.
Companies should not be let to use individual artists' work for their own corporate agenda. That's not right, whatever the message.
Di Modica, who still owns the bull, should put it somewhere else -- maybe in a different city.
Doing that could be an even bigger act of subversion than placing the girl there. What would become the meaning of the girl then?
Example: works sponsored by the House of Medici
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseus_with_the_Head_of_Medus...
> That changes everything
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the artist's agenda. Should an artist be expected to turn down funding for their work just because they don't like the way the funder interprets their work?
Edit: https://www.ssga.com/global/en/about-us/who-we-are/team.html - at least there are some women on their team I guess. That makes it less pinkwashy.
But mostly in staff, not investment, roles. So don't give up your bucket of pink just yet.
Over the years, Di Modica has made an enormous profit off the sale of replica bulls to cities and wealthy clients. Along the way, he's filed lawsuits and pulled stunts to keep the statue in the public eye, but the motive has always been profit.
Is there anything wrong with profit? No, certainly not. I love the hustle and I love the hustle on top of the original hustle with the addition of Fearless Girl.
It's fine art and a fine hustle. Just like all good art should be. Sit back and enjoy the show.
He should have taken that $350K and put it into stocks in 1987, he would be much better off. I suspect he had other motivations.
Side note: this was the third time Di Modica tried the tactic of dropping off gift sculptures. So, if he had that kind of money to burn on "artistic statements", I'd say he was doing a-ok without investing in the market.
In retrospect, yes. The art could have just been permanently removed by the city, and nothing would have come out of it (except some extra fines).
The bull is still there because it makes a statement that appeals to certain people. The amount of money Di Modica spent on it is tangential at best.
Citation needed.
For some people's ethical values (which is the only way to judge "wrong" and "right"), there is.
For one (again in some views) it dilutes the power of art as a statement in itself.
Aestheticism has been used for nearly two centuries now to hustle artists out of their just rewards. However, like any "moral" framework, it works both ways and plenty of artists have used it to hustle wealthy patrons with dulcet dreams sculpted from lofty ideals.
It was all so much easier in the days of Michelangelo when artists expected to be paid like craftsmen. Reading his collected letters is a delight I can highly recommend.
It's also something several artists truly believed, not used it as a hustle, and never took money to water their art, even if they were offered the chance, and even if they had to live poor because of it.
Including people starting with, and staying committed, either to arts like poetry, which don't come with any rewards and wealthy patrons in the first place, or with genres/attitude towards some otherwise potentially lucrative art that's decidedly non-commercial.
And that's not because they were lured by e.g. some music executives to hustle them out of their just rewards -- they chose to sell less (or not at all) and make no rewards for anybody to steal in the first place. If anything those execs would love for those artists to compromise -- so the total opposite of them using aestheticism to steal their "just rewards".
Di Modica can't really remove the bull statue then since that would signify defeat. Likewise with facing it in another direction. As other commenters have said, doing either could potentially start a positioning war anyways.
As far as symbology is concerned, I think the most forward-looking solution is to have the girl statue positioned slightly beside the bull, facing the same direction—signifying that America has her back and that everyone's on the same team.
Obviously the United States has a history of repressing women, so I could see the intentional choice to face her in opposition—if it were a legit piece of guerrilla art, and not an advertisement.
Commissioned corporate art hijacking classic guerilla art by twisting its meaning is, well... bullshit.
A corporate advertising campaign co-opts social media and a vacuous fawning politician into demanding its advert must stay and be worshipped, and the symbol of America's indomitable spirit and dynamism is packed into a shipping container and sent to Shanghai...
I think it'd be hard to say Di Modica had been "defeated" as an artist if that all unfolded... and he'd probably have quite a few million from the sale to take solace in (plus being able to charge the city copyright royalties when it commissions a replica replacement).
Defeat in context of the principles the statue represents, not Di Modica personally as an artist. Sorry, I should have been more clear.
That said, I suppose the beauty of art is that it's open to interpretation, and even the scenario you outline could be construed as congruent with the principles the statue represents. Removal may not constitute defeat after all.
The bull should be challenging a bear in the Wall St. iconography. I think a bear statue would compliment the bull nicely in this case. And additionally, if you've made it a pedestrian bear then, I am sure, the ad agency would have moved the girl statue away promptly.
Di Modico wins, because artists thrive on publicity. If you want people to buy or exhibit your work, they need to know your name. I live half a planet away from the New York Stock Exchange and I hadn't heard of Arturo Di Modica until today (and I think the scupture is amazing). If I read things correctly, this is just the latest in a series of publicity stunts surrounding Charging Bull so I suspect Di Modica knows what he's doing. The outcome (whether Fearless Girl is removed or not) does not impact this at all.
The people of New York win, because now they doesn't have one artwork right out the NYSE that can be interpreted and explained in many ways and makes people think, but they have two, locked in symbiosis. Together with the history and controversy behind both works, possible interpretations of either work individually, and with respect to each other, this is a fantastic and enviable piece of public culture. I envy the tour guides who get to explain this stuff to tourists.
Third wave feminists win, because a large financial organization publicizing a diversity fund in such a public and original way not only helps their cause, but shows how mainstream their cause has become. This is not a fringe movement anymore, and Fearless Girl makes this more apparent than anything recently.
Finally, SSGA wins because their diversity fund gets the publicity they hoped for when commissioning Fearless Girl.
Looks to me like there's no downside.
(sidenote: I don't think what I love more: guerilla art right in investment bankers' faces, or guerilla marketing commissioned by investment banker masquerading as guerilla art right in investment bankers' faces)
A marketing gimmick alongside punk?
But it's doing that to a statue celebrating capitalism. The irony goes so deep.
I think it's important that the beholder/public in general is aware of the providence of a piece of art, yet I doubt banning corporate sponsorship of art would be a net positive for society.
Additonally, I would say that the bull statue has well and truly earned its place. It is now an established piece of art: it has been subverted.
Pretty much the whole concept and the intended message of the artwork is 'falling back on power alone is not good enough', or indeed 'justice matters'. In that context, it doesn't matter if the fund underperforms its peers or a simple index fund, it matters whether people can be persuaded to support it on other grounds.
Personally I prefer the second version..
Or girl who isn't paying attention about to get wrecked by a bull.
In effect marketing is doing to feminism what it did to punk.
Hell, the Bull predates Enron. I think it's wholly legitimate to re-examine notions like 'the strength of the finance system'. There's a saying that insanity is making the same mistake over and over. The Bull is in a sense the perfect artistic representation of this very mistake.
In this case, the sooner its removed the better. However, I do hope that this inspires someone with good intentions to one-up the piece for the greater good and not a corporation's bottom line.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/14/fearle...
Arguable though.
The corporation and the marketing firm didn't make Fearless Girl, Kristen Visbal did.
The same goes for the bull. If he had a plaque on it with his name, an artist statement, and some information to contact him, the piece wouldn't have had such an impact.
I actually thought it was a reproduction of photos of the running of the bulls. Specifically, that moment in time where the fool in front and the bull both go round a corner. The bull tries to turn on the cobble stones of pamplona, but as a result, its hoofs begin to slide out from underneath it, and you tend to get photos like this one:
http://theday.co.uk/images/stories/2012/2012-07/2012-07-10_b...
Which is to say, the bull (market) has gotten out of control, and that statue represents the classical view you see of a bull that gotten out of control in the split second before everyone gets really hurt.
Honestly, i like my interpretation better :P
The three pieces would become a single work warning about Wall Street threatening our future.
[1] https://www.frankfurt-tourismus.de/en/Media/Attractions/Bull...
https://creamskyeyes.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/bear-hunting-i...
and cows:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dott-return-cows-kuhunst
And Prague has babies:
https://www.tonyeveling.com/blog/baby-sculptures-in-prague/
Not to mention giant anuses you can stick your head in, and public urinating sculptures writing text messages with their penises:
http://www.boredpanda.com/bizzare-sculptures-by-david-cerny/
You can climb a ladder and stick your head in the sculpture’s arse to see a video of two Czech politicians feeding each other slop to a soundtrack of "We are the Champions"
[...]
The idea is disarmingly simple. Two bronze sculptures pee into their oddly-shaped enclosure (Update: actually it’s the shape of the Czech Republic – thanks Cirrat).
While they are peeing, the two figures move realistically. An electric mechanism driven by a couple of microprocessors swivels the upper part of the body, while the penis goes up and down. The stream of water writes quotes from famous Prague residents.
Visitor can interrupt them by sending SMS message from mobile phone to a number, displayed next to the sculptures. The living statue then "writes" the text of the message, before carrying on as before.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/disturbing-statue-nude-d...
Then place the coiled sculpture of Quetzacoatl behind the charging bull.
http://www.sanjose.com/underbelly/unbelly/Sanjose/Quetzy/que...
The problem is that the old piece of art has in effect been destroyed.
Imagine if I purchased Vincent van Gogh's painting 'The Starry Night' and painted over the sky to make it 'The Bright Day'.
Imagine if the publisher of the Harry Potter books decided to rewrite the protagonist as a six inch alien in disguise - and did not publish the original work.
The Fearless Girl artist should use a replica of the bull and place it in a different location.
For example, it's impossible to talk about women's rights without having people take extreme sides are reject any form of intelligent communication.
Unfortunately this has been leaking more and more towards real life. People in large part repeat slogans and take predefined stances instead of using their own heads.
This case is no different: the world is not divided in good, left leaning, progressive people and bad, right leaning, conservative people.
A more realistic spectrum is bigots, people who think religiously about things and don't accept uncertainty to people that embrace reasonable change and diversity of opinion. People that accept that art expresses emotions and people that don't accept art that does not conform to their philosophy (remember the Talibans defacing the Buddhas in Afghanistan?)
I guess it's nice she is standing up and all but given the situation she isn't going to win. Apparently this girl has very little understanding of proportional weights and forces.
In short, I don't see brave but rather stupid. Not an admirable quality.
Sassy girl needs a horse and a lasso or rocket launcher or something. Or else a plate and a knife and a bottle of A1 steak sauce. Then I'd get the point.
Because all too often it demonstrates to us how little we have progressed as a species even though our tools have improved massively.
The struggles of today are either directly attributed to historical events, or are basically the same ones that historical societies struggled with.
This because no matter how much we try to claim otherwise, we are still apes. Our instincts today are largely the same ones that our shared ancestor with chimps and bonobos had.
[1] http://www.frankfurt-tourismus.de/en/Media/Attractions/Bull-...
A sustained move in one direction over weeks is a "bull market" or "bear market".
I am not in favor of "patriarchate oppression" interpretation that everybody seems to invoke. She's confident, and she looks at the bull with genuine curiosity, not resentment. I think it sends the right message.
Maybe the town could add a tall plate next to each statue, with information about the creator, the installment date, etc and let people who care enough, to judge themselves.
Separtely both are great work of art even after considering source of funds. But they managed to ruin both of them.
http://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/medium...
For some, like me, the pair of them, the Bull and the girl, are much more powerful art than either of them independently. That the girl was created in part as an advertising pitch was news to me, but the art stands by itself.
I wonder how the artist of Fearless Girl would react if someone placed a Bart Simpson statue directly in front of the girl like this:
So the difference in the end would be just who has to turn:
- The statue that is there for decades.
- The statue that is there for less than one year.
If people where not doing this about (what they think in their heads is) some politically correct argument but about art (which is the point of the author of the article) than the answer would be obvious.
The creator of the bull, the person who doesn't like this situation, can only affect his statue. Therefore, all he can do is turn the bull.
Imagine that they do that and then the girl changes position to be in front of the bull again. And then again and again. What a coward bull!
>by an investment fund called State Street Global Advisors, which has assets in excess of US$2.4 trillion.
This doesn't seem like it can be correct. What does this number represent?
"We specialize in profiting from misfortune when the market is tanking ... but we aren't scared of the bull, either: bring it on!"
On another note... While on the gregfallis.com website, it would be a shame to miss his 'Faux Life' series:
https://gregfallis.com/category/faux-life/
I love the series, and it further illustrates the idea of 'juxtaposition art' (and of 'appropriation art').
Just because Picasso (or some living author if you prefer for the example) doesn't own one of his paintings anymore, it's not artistically acceptable (arguably even culturally acceptable) for the owner of the painting to go there and just paint something over it that totally changes the meaning of the original painting.
Just because you are legally entitled to do something, it doesn't mean you should do something. As a recent example, just look at the United Airlines example for instance.
To me it represents a symbol in the war against men.
But what authority determines what is artistically acceptable, or which work's meaning is not allowed to be reinterpreted, commented upon or even ridiculed by another artist? What art permits in the service of social commentary and criticism is often at odds with what culture permits.
That depends on what you regard as equivalent to the canvas in the context of a public sculpture.
The actual physical form of the statue is probably the equivalent to its canvas - or I suppose it would also be the sidewalk underneath it, since that "contains" the artwork.
But to me it makes little sense to claim any arbitrary space around a statue as being equivalent to the artwork itself.
I'm not convinced that this sort of dishonest communication is what's required to give women a more even playing field in business. If that was the commissioners' intent, of which I am also not convinced.
Soldiers get yellow. Environment gets green. Anarchy gets black. Peace gets white. Coke gets red.
Poor women. Have to share the worst color with cancer.
And pink is only the color of breast cancer, not all cancer, since it's seen as a 'women's issue'.
Originally people used to dress male babies in red, because it was the colour of blood, war, strength, etc...
And female babies in blue, because it was the colour of peace, the sky, etc...
Around the 1960s when the feminists started to push for gender neutral clothes among other things, some of them made a campaign asking major companies (for example Sears catalog) to instead use the colours inverted, red for girls, and blue for boys, just to force some 'equality'
The campaign sort of worked, but flew way over people heads, they just started to assume red (and later pink as a softer tone of red for babies) and blue (and later light blue, for same reasons as pink) were the colours of female and male babies, without knowing why...
The feminists that created the switch, wrote several articles and papers claiming these gendered baby clothes were oppressive and existed to control women... I wonder after the colours just switched, what they think.
That colors are oppressive, and exist to control women.
I seem to recall a (in)famous image of a certain president as a toddler, in what at first glance appears to be a dress.
As I understood it, all kids used to wear grey/white dress gowns that were easily bleachable and reusable and able to be passed down.
And then marketing companies decided that it was better if they imposed a cultural norm that if you have a boy and a girl, you need to buy two different outfits for each.
Similar to the only raison d'etre of absolutely stupid gendered products like shaving razors and deodorant.
Particularly after WW1 various industries that had massively scaled up to feed the war needed an outlet for their excess production capacity.
This lead to a marketing push to get people to think in terms of desires rather than needs.
Adam Curtis goes over this during his documentary series, The Century of the Self.
Such nationalistic bull-shit always irritates me.
As if people from other countries are not equally strong and powerful and as if a statue of an animal could symbolize that in some way.
On some level though it makes sense, American actions the world over often recall the bull-in-a-china-shop image.
Art does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in the world around it and if you place a work of art in a public space you have to assume that that context can and will change over time. Deliberately or by accident. After all, the artist took a risk by placing the statue in a public space without permission, he can't now turn around and claim that others should not take similar rights.
In this case it seems that 'the guy' has under-estimated the amount of empty space he would like to see around his art but he can solve that by simply taking his bull home and putting it in his garden. Fearless girl won't be able to follow and the bull will be safe from any further artistic intrusions.
This is unfair; while chauvinists obviously extol their country, one can celebrate it without declaring its superiority. As a non-American myself, I understand the antipathy against American Exceptionalism, but let's not put everything in the same bucket.
Maybe it's my jealousy coming from a small country with puny and weak people. But I suspect that if some immigrant artist would put up the statue of a lion on Dam Square here to commemorate the strength and power of the Dutch he or she would likely be laughed out of town, statue included.
American people have several reasons to be proud of themselves. Even when you add up all the missteps the balance is undoubtedly a net positive effect on the world.
Priceless. Thank you.
> American people have several reasons to be proud of themselves.
I'm sure they do.
> Even when you add up all the missteps the balance is undoubtedly a net positive effect on the world.
Call me in 20 years. Anyway, there is a vast difference between 'the American people' and 'America the country'.
>As if people from other countries are not equally strong and powerful
The tendency on HN to interpret any positive statement about the US or American culture as an implied insult to the rest of the world baffles me.
Nationalism is not evil. It is a necceasary baby step away from tribalism and towards a humanist ideal, by getting one to acknowledge that people hundreds of miles away share common ground with you.
This argument is like saying loving your wife (or husband) is bad because it's as if other women (or men) are not equally beautiful and smart and attractive. I think this is just fishing for offense.
I don't think it matters what the artists intent was. The public's interpretation changes, and if he'd really like, he can ask for a plaque describing his original intent.
> It could have been an elk, an explorer, or something abstract.
So we can hang billboards from the statue of liberty, then?
I'd have been offended if they did shitty art, but in this case, they took care and did an actual piece.
In financial jargon:
Bulls are peoples betting in growth saying buy, and betting on more dividends given to share holders vs work costs.
Bears are the one selling. (Bad news too to be honest, but more for share holders than workers)
A long trend in bullish behaviour is related to the richs getting richers.
Since it is in the financial district and they were pissed, it looks indeed the girl can be seen as a counter guerilla meaning finance is a symbol of countering the excess of finance.
Which, if it were the meaning would be kind of a strong alteration of one of the meaning of the oeuvre.
Knowing that among the undeniable moral right of the author there is right to prevent distortion, mutilation, or modification that would prejudice the author's honor or reputation, the guy do not have a point, he is in his lawfull right! Denying his point is just undermining the very few protection of authors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#In_the_United_Sta...
As a coder whose work is protected by Author's rights I strictly see as dangerous to fight against hardly claimed rights that makes our value.
I do free software and I do not give up on my moral rights and I think as a worker protected by these rights we should be educated in author's right and whether or not we like his point of view, we should stand for his claim because that is a fair right.
Imagine you make a software or an essay saying HN is full of interesting bright mind, and someone defaces it adding contents to mean HN is full of pedantic idiots. Would you like this?