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The latest supposed outrage causing convulsions amongst the MAGA set is a 12-foot tall bronze statue of an ordinary, if overweight, black woman that’s been put on display in Times Square for a month.
The sculptor, Thomas J Price (or someone speaking for him), explained in a statement that he chose to depict an anonymous (and fictionalized) woman of color instead of, say, some famous white dude because this “disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.” And he gave her a bit of an attitude as well, saying that “both her stature and her unbothered gaze are markers of status and authority; this is a figure who understands her worth.”
Apparently, some people don’t like having their traditional, er, ideas disrupted. On X, a horde of newly minted art critics, sent into a frenzy by posts from such notable figures as End Wokeness and Libs of Tik Tok, expressed their righteous fury. If you look very closely, you might notice just a slight hint of racism in some of the postings.
Huh. Apparently “sheb**n,” a vile term especially popular with white supremacists, isn’t considered a slur on X these days.
Other posters seemed madder that the woman in question was fat (like literally three quarters of adults in the US, including, you know, me, and probably more than a few of the posters on X). Lord knows that there have never been any other sculptures of fat women ever in the history of art.
Hmm. I guess that last post there had something to do with race as well as weight.
Meanwhile, some other posters saw the statue as a threat to the continued existence of Western civilization, such as it is.
And some of them managed to throw in weight-related jabs and “talking to the manager” jokes as well.
Then there was this guy:
Ok, then!
There are so many more of these but I’m just going to leave it at that.
Now, this is hardly the first time that people have lost their shit over art. When the artists we now know as the impressionists first exhibited their work en masse in 1863, critics were beside themselves over this weird, messy new kind of art, with one wag coining the term “impressionist” as an insult. When Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art show in 1917, critics were furious, regarding the whole thing as a vulgar joke. When Andres Serrano put a plastic crucifix in a jar of urine and took a picture of it in 1987, Senator Jesse Helms declared that he didn’t even think of the photo as art. “I don’t even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist,” he went on. “I think he was a jerk.” Off the floor of the Senate, I’m sure he called Serrano far worse things. Certainly other people did.
But while these reactions to then-challenging art were ultimately misguided, they were at least understandable. The impressionists were fundamentally transforming the way art portrays the world and challenging the public to start looking at things the way they did. (Now pretty much everyone simply regards these paintings as pretty.)
Duchamp intended his art as a provocation. Not only was he introducing a urinal to the world of high art, but he didn’t even make it himself; he bought it at, I guess, a urinal store, flipped it on its side, and called it “fountain,” upending the fundamentals of how art is made and blazing a path for generations of conceptual artists in the future.
As for Serrano’s Piss Christ, well, though Serrano said he meant the photo as a commentary “about what we’ve done to religion” it’s not hard to understand why many Christians were offended to see their Lord and Savior dipped in wee.
But Price’s statue is only offensive if you think that the only people who deserve public statues are famous and/or “heroic,” relatively thin, and preferably white. Like, you know, confederate generals. The main lines of “critique” of Price’s “Grounded in the Stars” is that it depicts:
- A possibly “sassy” black woman
- A fat woman apparently comfortable in her own skin
- A non-famous person
- ???
- PROFIT!
The conservative media, for its part, didn’t offer a critique of the statue that was much more sophisticated than this. Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire sniffed that the statue “appears to [represent] a slightly to moderately overweight black woman wearing jeans that are too tight for her, wearing a T-shirt that she apparently got at Walmart, and staring angrily at the cashier at CVS.” Daily Wire podcast blabber Matt Walsh complained on X that “they tear down statues of American heroes and replace them with statues of random obese black women.” On Fox News radio, Tomi Lahren sneered that “the woke mob is so obsessed with race and so soaked with blatant hatred of white people, it’s now erecting black woman statues to ‘fix racism.’ Let’s see how that one goes!”
The Western Journal mocked the statue for allegedly looking like “a fake-bronze plastic statue that resulted from hooking a ChatGPT-enabled laptop up to a 3D printer and entering the prompt ‘Create a bored person in line at Target.’” Revolver News described the woman in the statue as a “a blob in yoga pants with attitude,” asking
So this is how they imagine a woman’s stance now? Slouched shoulders, dead eyes, overweight, and simmering with quiet rage? This isn’t a celebration of femininity. It’s a warning sign. The statue looks less like a tribute to strength and more like a Karen caught mid-meltdown, ready to demand a manager or lecture a barista over oat milk.
Meanwhile, some site called Outkick took up this same tired “manager” trope, kvetching that
the wokes decided it was time for the Times Square white men to give up some of their turf to a big black woman who wants to speak to a manager NOW.
But my favorite, er, critique of the sculpture comes in a vaguely hysterical–well, testerical– screed posted by author John Daniel Davidson on The Federalist. Davidson, a senior editor at the comically reactionary website, sees the statue not as art but as a form of “cultural warfare” waged by “the cultural parasites of the left” against all that is good and true. The whole thing is worth reading, trust me, but these excerpts will give you some of the flavor.
Outraged that the statue depicts “a random black woman” Davidson thunders:
Having torn down beautiful statues of American heroes and icons, the left is now erecting intentionally ugly statues designed to attack the very idea of greatness and undermine the notion that exceptional people should be memorialized and honored in public. And they’re doing it for the ultimate purpose of seizing and wielding cultural and political power.
Damn, those lefties are sneaky! Statue warfare!
These people do not come to build but to destroy, and what they erect in the place of what they have destroyed isn’t just boring and narcissistic, it’s also cultural propaganda that insists on a neo-Marxist paradigm pitting the supposedly marginalized and oppressed against the oppressors. And we all know who the oppressors are.
Spoken like a dedicated member of the oppressor class.
By putting a statue of a random black woman at ground level, the message, at least on one level, is clear: Do not aspire to greatness, do not honor those who achieve objectively great things. What undergirds this message is a diabolical philosophy: There is no such thing as greatness, or honor, or beauty, goodness, or truth.
That’s a lot to blame on a statue, huh? Even one that’s 12 feet tall.
But the ultimate purpose of this kind of propaganda isn’t merely to push cultural relativism. It’s to accumulate power. Once the left has “disrupted” the idea of greatness and destroyed our cultural patrimony, it can impose a new set of standards that divides Americans into identity groups based on immutable characteristics like race and sex.
Yeah, it’s not as if the MAGA right is centered around, you know, white identity or anything.
Hence the white man of the past becomes the universal villain and the anonymous fat black woman becomes the true American hero, the one who should be immortalized in bronze.
There are, I should note, two other statues up in Times Square, and not just for a month. They are, of course, statues of white men, and they’ve been there forever. Price didn’t demand that they be torn down and replaced with his statue, merely that his statue be allowed to be displayed alongside them.
Davidson, for his part, does think statues like Price’s should be torn down and replaced with the statues the evil leftist parasites have targeted for forcible retirement in recent years. “Random black women” don’t deserve any sort of public representation, I guess, while the mostly very problematic white dudes in the statues that have been removed across America–like, you know, confederate generals–should be forever honored. Got it.
Nothing racist going on here. Just some good old fashioned art criticism.
EDIT: Thanks to Crip Dyke for the word “testerical.”
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At least she isn’t playing a flute.
I use “testerical” for these purposes.
On another topic, it’s almost surprising how many people came close to getting it. It’s not about destroying the concept of greatness, but it very much is about asking what makes a person “great” and what makes a person worthy of memorialization. Several ppl started out with something to the effect that this is an effort to get ppl to think differently about who in society is worth our attention.
But of course they then didn’t actually do any different thinking (or thinking at all). I would have respected the effort of someone who completed the assignment (thinking about who deserves statues) but came to the conclusion that they liked the values or balance of some past artistic period.
Personally I’m partial to mesolithic Willendorf, but maybe that’s just my good memories from dating a woman whose legs had been amputated before we met. But actually she was skinny, so it’s probably not that.
The irony is, in every practical sense, as a statue it’s about as conservative as you can get.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, one function of art is to preserve culture.
But it’s just so…..classic! People have been making large lifelike bronzes like that since, well, the Bronze Age. The pose is as old as time, the framing, everything. You could have stuck that in a city square in just about anywhere in the world in the last 2,000 years and it wouldn’t have looked out of place.
I liked it when people just got angry about painting a portrait in landscape mode.
Perhaps that’s what we need right now, instead of the dubious “meritocracy” these chucklefucks apparently prefer.
A celebration of ordinary people. You know, the ones it’s actually all about.
What, after all, is a non-mediocre person but one who is particularly well qualified to do some particular job or another? What, ultimately, is important about that person? That they might do an exceptional job. What’s important about that, in turn? The benefit to the people who are better served when that job is done, and done well. Aka “everybody else”.
Focusing on the people who are unusually good at a miscellany of jobs is, in a way, putting the cart before the horse.
No, the message is “do not kick yourself if you don’t achieve greatness; just being a person is enough.” Of course, that message is deadly to capitalism, and to other hierarchies of privilege. Why, if people stop defining their worth in terms of accolades that other people can bestow (or withhold, or withdraw after the fact), then how will the rabble be kept under control?! What will incentivize them to work 300 hours a week for $1.05 an hour flipping burgers, driving vans, and wrecking their joints with RSIs in warehouses? Certainly the $1.05 an hour alone won’t be sufficient to do that. We’d have to actually pay them a decent wage!!1!one
Decentering white people isn’t “hatred”. It’s just letting everyone else (probably over 2/3 of the world) have their turn too.
… says the one who actually seeks to divide Americans into identity groups for nefarious purposes. The projection is strong with this one!
She’s not even fat! That’s the shape of an ordinary woman who’s had a couple of kids and works a lot, without the time to live in a gym.
Not everyone is meant to be a stick! Fat distribution and retention are mostly genetic. What are these prats on about?
I am aware that none of these right-wing commentators actually know anything about the natural diversity of human bodies, and their ‘outrage’ is so very fake, a toy to rile up their audience. Art should provoke thought, outrage, and comment, but at least let it be based in reality.
This makes me glad i deleted my Twitter account.
And no, you can’t deadname a corporation. Because corporations are not people.
So, I guess getting kicked off Zuckerberg’s Famous Pig years ago for calling a prominent Faux News bobble-heading bottle blonde bimbo crotch-shot white-trash is no longer something to be proud of?
Crip Dyke, I took your suggestion and added “testerical.”
And you’re right, some of these people almost get it. So close!
“My critique of this statue has nothing to do with race.”
“For the record, I am not a crank.”
You just know that some of them are going to be all like “yay someone got this eyeblight removed! victory!” when it gets taken down on schedule a few weeks from now, and it will get added to all the other illusionary points they’re “racking up” on the culture wars. Not that much of anyone else will notice, because most people will have moved on to the next conservative outrage of the week, then to the next one, then to the next one after that.
Also interesting how some of the them seem to be associating “get me the manager” with lower-class Black women, as it’s much more commonly associated with middle-class White women.
You’ve probably all heard of Trafalgar Square.
As well as Nelson’s Column, the square has four plinths for statues. But they ran out of money so only three statutes got made. So for a century the plinth was empty.
But then the idea came along to use it for contemporary art, on a rotating basis. And pretty much the brief is, cause a controversy.
https://artuk.org/discover/curations/lists-of-london-fourth-plinth
My fave was when they had the big perspex copy of the plinth itself. People kept somehow climbing up and sticking inflatable polar bears on it so it looked like the Fox’s Glacier Mint adverts.
Alan Robertshaw
I rather liked the Alison Lapper Pregnant. I seem to remember it causing a lot of outrage.
Off topic, but after the May Day protest in the US there’s preparation for a similar Flag Day protest (June 14). This has sparked discussions (at least in my circles, not sure how common it is elsewhere) about whether “reclaiming” the US flag should be a theme, not just for this one event, but going forward. On one side, there’s the appearance (rightly or wrongly) of the Left having ceded things like patriotism and the “Soul of Americana” to the Right, to the point where equality and diversity are treated as a form of rot eating away at our “Great Nation”… and that we should seize that narrative and invert it. On the other side, patriotic jingoism and flag worship have no place in the future we’re trying to build and adopting a left-wing version of that would be counterproductive in the long run, not to mention a bit evil and kind of gross.
I’m currently on the fence here; on one hand I agree philosophically with the latter, but on the other, if that’s what it takes to pull us back from the brink, then it’s probably worth it, because having to re-fight nearly every civil rights battle won since the 1960s would likely be even more counterproductive in the long run. The key here is that I don’t know if we’re that far gone yet, or if it would really work regardless.
@David:
You’re very welcome!
@Alan
I’ve vaguely known about the empty plinth for a long time, but I guess I assumed it was only periodically filled? But maybe I’m wrong and it’s filled near constantly but I only hear about it every once in a while?
That’s probably it. I am a ways away.
I’m certainly no art critic, but I must say that the woman in this statue is NOT fat by any means. She is the size of the average American woman, a size 14. Her clothes are not too tight, either. I guess these critics only want to see emaciated white women in butt floss.
So…
Ordinary black woman = not great.
White man who would have made her a slave 200 years ago = great.
Good to get that cleared up!
I wonder how many of the people moaning about “meritocracy” and “the decline of Western civilization” voted for Trump?
@personalpest:
Probably most of the ones that were eligible to. (There are lots of folks who complain about stuff like that that aren’t U.S. citizens or otherwise aren’t eligible to vote in the U.S.)
Most of the people making the loudest complaints about ‘hiring on merit’ (especially once you limit to the ones complaining about the decline of Western Civilization) seem to be operating under the implicit assumption that there’s just no way that anybody who isn’t cis/white/male could possibly as good without cheating. Never mind the actual experience that shows that diverse hiring often produces better results (wider talent pool to scoop the top 1% from, and getting rid of the folks who are only around because of the Old Boy’s Network); some folks just take ‘I’m inherently better so if someone not like me got promoted over me it’s a personal affront’ as an axiom.
No one ever said racists were logical or informed. The stupidity of calling the woman a Karen, is that Black people originally coined the term to mean an entitled white women who harasses non-white service workers.