Rock bottom: Why must deliberately ugly sculpture invade all our public spaces?

We have a crisis of trashy public “art,” and sculpture is one of the main offenders. More on this below; I have to buffer your reading experience with a reminder of actual beauty before we dive to the bottom of the aesthetic dumpster.

When I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave me a small hardback book of Greek mythology. I can’t remember the title. It was written in the 1940s and probably used as a textbook or primer for college-level courses.

They say that some children have a face only a mother can love, but not even the father of that piece could look at it and see anything but a gargoyle at hell’s check-in kiosk.

It smelled exactly as you’re imagining right now: that scent of a 20th-century quality-bound book from the library stacks. Though only about seven inches by four inches, it had onionskin pages like a Bible, and there must have been 900 of them.

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Set in stone

The book always fell open to the same page because I always looked at that one. There was a black-and-white photograph of Bernini’s bust of Medusa. It fascinated me, and only later did I realize that the figure of Medusa drew me so powerfully, in part, because my mother was a gorgon.

But it wasn’t just that. The detail and life Bernini infused into stone took my breath away. How could a piece of marble be made so like a human face that we try to divine the emotion in the carved eyes?

Photo: Shhewitt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Have you seen the statuary of veiled figures? They offer the most incredible illusion of the Virgin behind a gossamer veil of the thinnest translucent silk. To look at a statue like this is to feel a glimmer of the divine. And this example, the Veiled Virgin, was carved in the 19th century. This means that until fairly recently, there were still skilled sculptors who have earned the title “artist.”

So what the hell is this?

Adam Moss via Flickr/Creative Commons

Brucille

I can tell you what it is not: Lucille Ball. It appears to be a bronze casting of Brucille Lall, Lucy’s evil trans-identifying cousin. Who could believe that the figure is offering Vitameatavegamin, when it’s obviously liquid arsenic? "Just like candy” indeed.

The sculptor behind the piece (the late David Poulin), which was installed in the comedy legend’s hometown in 2015 to honor her, gave up his craft after the negative public reaction. He complained to local media that he was tired of being razzed for a statue that was “not one of my best works.”

Well? They say that some children have a face only a mother can love, but not even the father of that piece could look at it and see anything but a gargoyle at hell’s check-in kiosk.

You have to ask: What possessed the city government in Celoron, New York, to pretend that this is normal? Is it the sunk-cost fallacy? Is it embarrassment at wasting money on a figure that has sent local children to long-term therapy?

Hug it out

Whatever motivates this behavior was probably also at work in Boston when it commissioned and placed this atrocity downtown. Called the Embrace, this bronze oversized ... whatever ... allegedly depicts a hug between Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

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Take it in. If it helps, you can let Boston Mayor Michelle Wu explain to you how this piece “differs from the singular, heroic form of many memorials to Dr. King and others, instead emphasizing the power of collective action, the role of women as leaders, and the forging of new bonds of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability."

Or, like one local Reddit commenter, you can just trust your own eyes: "Could have been something amazing but instead we get a somewhat pornographic bronze turd."

This turd, the work of a successful black artist named Hank Willis Thomas, beat out 125 other designs. Thomas says he didn't want to "oversimplify" MLK's legacy by proposing something that actually looked like him.

Sure. Or maybe he figured his best chance to win was to submit something so bizarre and off-putting that the judges would have no choice but to mistake it for brilliance. And why not? Liberal white people (like the billionaire entrepreneur who spearheaded the project) love to demonstrate their sophistication by praising provocatively ugly and incompetent art — especially if it allows them to take credit for supporting "diversity."

Less impressed by the Embrace was a cousin of Coretta Scott King, who simply called it “an atrocity.”

Monumental entitlement

Dismembering your subjects so that only a grotesque pair of floating limbs remains is one way to make a name for yourself as a public artist. Another way is to dispense with the tired notion that only people who have accomplished something should get a statue.

That's the approach of black British sculptor Thomas J. Price, who specializes in oversized monuments to mean-looking, fat black women who appear to be waiting to speak to the manager.

Here's Grounded in the Stars, the 12-foot bronze sculpture Price installed in Times Square last spring.

Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images

You see, what Price is doing here is "challeng[ing] historical notions of representation in NYC's most iconic public space." Oh. Someone better tell the many black women who find the statue "humiliating" and "insulting."

Another recent piece by Price is a 13-foot statue of a surly-looking young black woman holding her cell phone out in classic I'm-going-to-treat-this-crowded-bus-like-my-living-room-and-have-this-annoyingly-loud-conversation-on-speaker posture. (Credit where it’s due — that does indeed capture the entitlement of many women today.)

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But is putting it in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria alongside classical and Renaissance sculpture really "a significant conversation with the canons and aesthetic models that have defined the history of Western art for centuries"? Or is it just another big, resentful middle finger to "whiteness" and its oppressive standards of beauty?

Simply the worst

But wait — there’s more! The latest insult to black womanhood is a grotesque tribute to the legendary Tina Turner, who died in 2023. It must be seen to be believed.

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You know this is the work of a black artist because any white person creating such a monstrosity would immediately be charged with a hate crime. Fred Ajanogha (“also known as ‘Ajano’”) is an Atlanta-based "master sculptor" who works in the storied "Benin Bronze" tradition of his native Nigeria.

Making a sculpture with this ancient wax-casting technique does indeed require a certain mastery. What it doesn't require, apparently, is any sort of reference photo of Ms. Turner.

Do admit — it looks like he gave the legendary singer Down syndrome, as well as hair lifted directly from the McDonaldland Fry Guys.

This Trisomy Tina now graces Turner's small Tennessee hometown. Fan's of Turner's song "Nutbush City Limits" know it as a pleasant community full of proud locals intent on keeping it that way. They make sure it's clean. They don't allow motorcycles or liquor.

Most of all, they don't tolerate any out-of-towners disrupting things with their dumb, big-city ideas. "You have to watch what you're puttin' down." Unfortunately, it looks like times have changed, even in old Nutbush.