Gasp, Fearless Girl statue in NY latest social media outrage.

[Strassia]

Repurposing art has been around for a long time, and has always been very subjective. An example from an art history class:

The Kiss (Rodin sculpture)

In Spring 2003, artist Cornelia Parker intervened in The Kiss (1886) with the permission of the Tate Britain gallery,[4] where it was exhibited at the time, by wrapping the sculpture in a mile of string. This was a historical reference to Marcel Duchamp’s use of the same length of string to create a web inside a gallery in 1942.[5] Although the intervention had been endorsed by the gallery, many viewers of the sculpture felt it offensive to the original artwork, prompting a further, unauthorised, intervention, in which Parker’s string was cut by Stuckist Piers Butler, while couples stood around engaging in live kissing.[6]

Or what if a third artist puts a statue of little Ruby Bridges in between the girl and bull. now instead of representing female empowerment, she represents segregation and white supremacy.
https://www.google.com/search?q=integration+mississippi&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUgoTZgaXTAhWFQSYKHYvzD-cQ_AUIBygC&biw=1920&bih=990#tbm=isch&q=ruby+bridges

[Miller]

@aldiboronti

I believe the artist has a valid point. The Fearless Girl statue has totally changed his work of art. If the sculptor of the Girl wanted to make a statement about a bold female facing up to a bull then he or she would be quite free to make such a sculpture but co-opting the work of another artist as part of your own is not right. I really hope that the guy wins his case, I think he’s being victimized here.

I kind think putting “Fearless Girl” there was a dick move to the original artist. It recontextualizes the first work in a way that makes it into something negative, and implies certain values to the first work (sexism, chiefly) that weren’t there in the original context. I can sympathize with the first artist being kind of pissed about it. I probably would be too, if I were in his position.

But he’s got absolutely no legal leg to stand on. He dumped the statue on the street in the middle of the night, with no permits or permissions for it to be there. He effectively abandoned the statue. It’s not “his” any more in any legal sense. He’s lost any physical ownership claim to the statue. If the city wants to cover it in paint, weld another statue onto its back, or melt it down for subway tokens, the artist has no legal right to object.

Further, while the juxtaposition of the two statues absolutely changes the interpretation of the bull, the girl statue is not actually touching or physically altering the original work in anyway. I don’t think an artist should be able to sue because there’s another piece of art that’s adjacent to his. The implications of this suit, should it succeed, would be very chilling to the concept of free speech. Imagine if someone puts up a poster containing, say, a bunch of lies about the Holocaust. And then someone puts up a poster next to it, refuting those lies. Does the person who put up the first poster have a justification to sue the person who put up the second, on the grounds that the second poster is interfering with the message of the first?

[DSeid]

@Miller

I kind think putting “Fearless Girl” there was a dick move to the original artist. It recontextualizes the first work in a way that makes it into something negative, and implies certain values to the first work (sexism, chiefly) that weren’t there in the original context. I can sympathize with the first artist being kind of pissed about it. I probably would be too, if I were in his position.

But he’s got absolutely no legal leg to stand on. He dumped the statue on the street in the middle of the night, with no permits or permissions for it to be there. He effectively abandoned the statue. It’s not “his” any more in any legal sense. He’s lost any physical ownership claim to the statue. If the city wants to cover it in paint, weld another statue onto its back, or melt it down for subway tokens, the artist has no legal right to object.

Further, while the juxtaposition of the two statues absolutely changes the interpretation of the bull, the girl statue is not actually touching or physically altering the original work in anyway. I don’t think an artist should be able to sue because there’s another piece of art that’s adjacent to his. The implications of this suit, should it succeed, would be very chilling to the concept of free speech. Imagine if someone puts up a poster containing, say, a bunch of lies about the Holocaust. And then someone puts up a poster next to it, refuting those lies. Does the person who put up the first poster have a justification to sue the person who put up the second, on the grounds that the second poster is interfering with the message of the first?

1. Were sexist values never there? Sure it was 1989 and normal for the time but the machismo of the bull and its big cahones (the move that matters in regards to this statue) as emblematic of Wall Street doing well seems to contain some sexist messaging implicitly.

2. He does actually still legally own the statue. It is not considered abandoned property; it is considered to be on loan. He does have an artistic copyright on it.

3. But agreed that you cannot command how viewers interpret your work and that others imposing a meaning upon it that you deny, parodying it, arguing with it, whatever, is legal, whether it is justified or just rude.

4. Again though I’d love to hear our legal minds opine on this particular circumstance in which Fearless Girl only functions in conjunction with Charging Bull and is site-specific to utilize it as context. The legal issue to me is not that it changes its meaning but that it functions with Charging Bull as a new cohesive work without the permission of Charging Bull’s copyright holder. It could be reinforcing the intended meaning for that issue to be one of some potential interest to this non-legal mind. Does that count as a “derivative work” which is protect by his copyright?

[Spice_Weasel]

@don_t_ask

I have read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and one of the striking things about his thesis was just how lacking in anonymity we are today and how easy it is to be brought undone. Yet this sinner, as far as I can tell, remains simply " the guy who…"

Worth a read? I find his interviews fascinating.

[BigT]

I have to agree that the statue already had the sexist meaning inherent in it. If it didn’t, then the new statue would not be able to bring it out. People would see the two statues, and think they weren’t directly related. Maybe they’d think it was about sexism on Wall Street, but not that the previous work itself was sexist.

I don’t think artists have any ability, let alone right, to control what message people get out of their art. The only thing they can do to change the message is to change the art.

I do think the guy may be within his rights to deal with a contract issue, though. If he still owns the copyright and it’s on loan, there must be some contract involved, and that contract would lay out what they are and are not allowed to do with the statue. If there’s some sort of defamation clause, maybe he’d have a case. If he just has the ability to take it back if he’s dissatisfied, then he clearly can do that.

But I can’t see how copyright itself would be an issue. Imagine I had authorized reprints of a Pollock and a Kinkaide and put them together. Could the owner of Pollock’s estate force me to take it down, as long as I owned the property, since I’m debasing Pollock by putting him with Kinkaid?

That meaning may be there, but if I have an authorized copy (or even a properly purchased original), then I have a right to do with it what I want. I didn’t license them based on terms that I wouldn’t do anything to defame them.

[DSeid]

@BigT

… But I can’t see how copyright itself would be an issue. Imagine I had authorized reprints of a Pollock and a Kinkaide and put them together. Could the owner of Pollock’s estate force me to take it down, as long as I owned the property, since I’m debasing Pollock by putting him with Kinkaid? …

Again I do not know the answer but to help with your imagination, the circumstance is quite different. Those would two works each created by the artists to stand as individual pieces. Fearless Girl OTOH was apparently created to be part of a diptych with Charging Bull and that integrated diptych is the new work of art, not the statue of the girl alone.

Is that creation “derivative” or is it “fair use”?

[Corry_El]

@don_t_ask

I wonder why, with all the publicity that the photo received, no-one has recognized the man in the photo?

I have read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and one of the striking things about his thesis was just how lacking in anonymity we are today and how easy it is to be brought undone. Yet this sinner, as far as I can tell, remains simply " the guy who…"

The supposed ‘finance bro’? Obviously a dick, or acting like one at that moment anyway. However if I knew who he was I wouldn’t publicize it. People who do recognize him might feel similarly. Social media lynch mobs are getting out of control IMO and I think there’s a serious ethical issue in enabling them.

It’s also possible that despite the assumption (on no evidence) that he’s a finance guy working in the area he could be from far enough away that people who know him actually didn’t follow the uproar.

[Jophiel]

@BigT

I have to agree that the statue already had the sexist meaning inherent in it.

Well, it’s a bull and bulls only come in one flavor: male. However, it’s the symbol of an upwards (bull) market in the context of Wall Street and not “men are the greatest yay!!”

It has testicles because, again, bulls only come in the “boy” setting and that includes boy parts. You’re all welcome to independently Google “bull testicles” if you think the artist overdid them for masculine sexist purposes. If anything, he under-represented the hanging sack.

The only masculine sexism inherent in the statue is that which the viewer projects on it because “tee-hee cow balls!”

If it didn’t, then the new statue would not be able to bring it out.

Nah. The statue was put up in the wake of the women protests and marches. It was obvious what the message was. In a vacuum, the bull is just a bull, traditional symbol of market strength.

[don_t_ask]

@Spice_Weasel

Worth a read? I find his interviews fascinating.

Yes. All his books are great reads. He has also done lots of TV stuff and the movies Frank and *The Men Who Stare at Goats *are based on a couple of his books.

A lot of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was presaged in his Guardian columns all of which are about interesting stuff.

[DSeid]

A very good review including the legal aspects of the circumstance in The Christian Science Monitor here.

Interesting context.

First that Fearless Girl does seem to have been commissioned by State Street Global Advisors to market their “gender diversity index” and does consequently intentionally place the now subverted Charging Bull as part of their campaign.

Di Modica’s lawyers explicitly make that “derivative work” argument:

Hyman and the rest of Di Modica’s legal team contend “Fearless Girl” is a publicity stunt to raise attention to this exchange-traded fund, and that the bull, which Di Modica has copyrighted and trademark, is a central part of this campaign.

“The statue of the young girl becomes the ‘Fearless Girl’ only because of the ‘Charging Bull’: the work is incomplete without Mr. Di Modica’s Charging Bull, and as such it constitutes a derivative work of the Charging Bull,” reads a letter his lawyers sent New York Mayor Bill de Blasio earlier this week. “Clearly, a deliberate choice was made to exploit and to appropriate the Charging Bull through the placement of the Fearless Girl.”

The issue of an artist’s “moral right” is a different one. And there is a discussion to be had of what “should” be, and a different one to have over what legally is.

From the linked article:

It is inevitable an artwork’s meaning will change over time. From Paleolithic wall paintings in Lascaux, France, to Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” to the Statue of Liberty, the environment and culture that surround art influence the way that it is viewed. But the abrupt change to “Charging Bull” has raised age-old questions about who can and should control the way art is seen and interpreted.

The French concept of an artist’s moral rights, or droit moral, aims to protect the special relationship between a created work and its creator, sometimes referred to as an artist’s soul. But should this concept, adopted in the United States under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA), enable artists to control the way they believe their works should viewed? …

Precedence quoted that the courts would say it does not is a comment by Alito in 2009 noting that the message of a work is freely open to interpretation and will change, using the Statue of Liberty as one example

The statue was given to this country by the Third French Republic to express republican solidarity and friendship between the two countries… At the inaugural ceremony, President Cleveland saw the statue as an emblem of international friendship and the widespread influence of American ideals. Only later did the statue come to be viewed as a beacon welcoming immigrants to a land of freedom.

More from the actual opinion:

The meaning conveyed by a monument is generally not a simple one like “ ‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.’ ” Johanns, supra, at 554. Even when a monument features the written word, the monument may be intended to be interpreted, and may in fact be interpreted by different observers, in a variety of ways. Monuments called to our attention by the briefing in this case illustrate this phenomenon.

What, for example, is “the message” of the Greco-Roman mosaic of the word “Imagine” that was donated to New York City’s Central Park in memory of John Lennon? See NYC Brief 18; App. to id., at A5. Some observers may “imagine” the musical contributions that John Lennon would have made if he had not been killed. Others may think of the lyrics of the Lennon song that obviously inspired the mosaic and may “imagine” a world without religion, countries, possessions, greed, or hunger.2

Or, to take another example, what is “the message” of the “large bronze statue displaying the word ‘peace’ in many world languages” that is displayed in Fayetteville, Arkansas?3

These text-based monuments are almost certain to evoke different thoughts and sentiments in the minds of different observers, and the effect of monuments that do not contain text is likely to be even more variable. Consider, for example, the statue of Pancho Villa that was given to the city of Tucson, Arizona, in 1981 by the Government of Mexico with, according to a Tucson publication, “a wry sense of irony.”4 Does this statue commemorate a “revolutionary leader who advocated for agrarian reform and the poor” or “a violent bandit”? IMLA Brief 13.

Contrary to respondent’s apparent belief, it frequently is not possible to identify a single “message” that is conveyed by an object or structure ...

… The “message” conveyed by a monument may change over time. A study of war memorials found that “people reinterpret” the meaning of these memorials as “historical interpretations” and “the society around them changes.” Mayo, supra, at 8–9

I think the “moral right” argument fails.

[Jophiel]

I’m not about to pretend that people’s views of art never change, etc. And I make no opinion on the legal arguments. But those examples strike me as weak for a simple reason: They’re all being judged on their own. There’s not a companion piece there set by others, changing the meaning of the original. The closest example would be the New Colossus plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty but that was put there by the government which also happens to own the statue rather than Emma Lazarus nailing it up in the middle of the night as some guerilla art piece.

[Gatopescado]

I’m offended because its not a very good statue.

I just deleted two simply awesome jokes for fear of getting another warning. The Dope just isn’t much fun anymore.

[CelticKnot]

Lots of stupid to go around here. Drunks are stupid. Taking this drunk’s actions personally is stupid.

Ask any farmer or rancher. Anyone who challenges a bull that way isn’t fearless, but stupid.

[DSeid]

Bump to update a bit.

The firm that commissioned the popular “Fearless Girl” statue in New York’s financial district has agreed to pay $5 million, mostly to settle claims that it discriminated against 305 top female employees by paying them less than men in the same positions. … State Street Global Advisors, a division of State Street Corporation, said that it had installed the statue there on the eve of International Women’s Day in order to celebrate “the power of women in leadership, and the potential of the next generation of women leaders.” … While praised by many, the statue has endured its share of criticism. Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor who created “Charging Bull,” has denounced the rival statue as an attack on and an insult to his own. Others have denounced “Fearless Girl” as “corporate feminism” and a “marketing coup.” …

Does this change any of your opinions about this work? Should it?

[Darren_Garrison]

@DSeid

Bump to update a bit.

Does this change any of your opinions about this work? Should it?

I’m getting really burned out on the current “take someone who has done many good things, dig up some bad things they have done, renounce all the good they ever did” fad.

[Jophiel]

@Darren_Garrison

I’m getting really burned out on the current “take someone who has done many good things, dig up some bad things they have done, renounce all the good they ever did” fad.

This isn’t like “Hero firefighter has unpaid tickets” though. This was a company that put up the statue as a PR schtick about how much they’re for promoting women in the workplace and then getting dinged for discriminating against women in the workplace. And this isn’t someone digging up a twenty year old event – the decision was this past week.

But, that said, I don’t think it needs to change anyone’s opinion of the piece itself. Just that the people who commissioned it are hypocritical.