MLK Hug Statue Controversy

ahhell said:
I'm sure that's what Senaca Scott, a member of the Choctaw nation and relative of Corretta Scott King, was thinking when he wrote:



ETA: That being said, the only thing that appears to be especially woke about the statue is the organization behind it which seems to mouth wokish platitudes.
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And has poor taste in art, IMHO.
 
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Ten. Million. Dollars.

Crunching some numbers here: the thing weighs 19 tons and is made of bronze. Bronze is running like $2.40/lb, so adding abt 10% for waste, it's a cool $100k in materials. Figure another $50k for site costs, footings to support it and tricking out some decorative pavers

The thing is abt 700 pieces welded together. Figure the fabricator is super slow and can only cut four pieces per day. Factoring in abundant coffee breaks, that's a year in labor. Pay him princely for his part time gig: another $100k. Then she's gotta be welded together and ground and polished and stuff. Allot another couple guys for a year at again $100k each. Throw another $100 grand in the kitty for transport and soft costs.

All in, there's about half a mil in actual costs here. Allot $20 for sitting on the commode one morning with some Play-Doh to make the concept piece. Not a nickel more, value considered.

That leaves $9 1/2 million out of the $10 million unaccounted for. And they say art isn't a front for money laundering.
 
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Major Major said:
Anyone remember Tilted Arc?
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Commissioned in 1979, Tilted Arc immediately attracted intense negative feedback, prominently from Chief Judge Edward D. Re, as well as fierce defenders. Those who worked in the area found the sculpture extremely disruptive to their daily routines, and within months the work had driven over 1300 government employees in the greater metro area to sign a petition for its removal.[8] Serra, however, wrote, "It is a site-specific work and as such is not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work."

Serra's side argued that Tilted Arc was designed to be counterintuitive, to "redefine" the space in which it existed, and that due to this intimate relationship between the location and the meaning of the work, it could not exist as a piece of humane art unless it remained in that exact location within the Foley Plaza.[2] Therefore, it was said that by removing the physical steel sculpture, the government would destroy the broader work, regardless of its physical existence.[10]

Opponents countered that, because the sculpture forced the site to function as an extension of the sculpture, it was in effect "holding the site hostage."​
Translation: Normal human beings walk across this plaza every day. Now there's an arbitrary wall across the most desirable pathways. The artist did this on purpose, and then got mad when people got mad at him for disrupting their lives to make them mad. He took the line that making people mad on purpose was the true nature of his artwork. Luckily for the people who actually live and work around the plaza - everyone who really matters in this story - the conclusion was that the artist took his ball and went home in a fit of pique.
 
Major Major said:
Anyone remember Tilted Arc?
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I'd love an artistic type to actually explain that one to me. The "minimalist artist" literally said the chunk of rust was to "redefine the space", which in lay terms means to force people to walk around the pointless thing. In short, to annoy the users by creating an obstacle. Seems like art should have higher aspirations other than to be ugly and annoying. We can get that for free.
 
paiute said:
My primary objection to this monstrosity is that it takes up valuable space on my Common - you know, the area that was to be saved for the use of all? If we memorialize all the worthies in this way, the Boston Common will someday be a landscape of bronze and granite surrounding a square foot of turf where there will be a marker reading: IMAGINE THIS ONLY 50 ACRES LARGER
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Valuable space on The Boston Commons? More space for aryan nation southies to fight black guys?
Pushing the actual Bostonians out is the greatest thing that could happen to any public space.
 
As a kind of abstract-ish statue maybe it has merit, but something honoring MLK? It just seems as depersonalized as you can get.

Maybe it's hard to capture him for some reason -- I'm not a fan of the Washington statue either, though I think it's better than this one.
 
Ryan O'Dine said:
As a kind of abstract-ish statue maybe it has merit, but something honoring MLK? It just seems as depersonalized as you can get.

Maybe it's hard to capture him for some reason -- I'm not a fan of the Washington statue either, though I think it's better than this one.
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The best thing you can say about this one is that it makes that one look better by comparison.

That one looks like a third world dictator, as conceived by the prop department of an 80s B-movie that spent half its plaster of paris budget on hookers and blow.
 
The "huge dong" interpretation seems very strange to me. It did still look like something sexual to me, but in a more symbolic & abstract way, and closer to human proportions. From the angle where you can see the female hands, they seemed to be touching or almost-touching the butt of the guy whose normal-sized dong she's sucking, which is consistent with the appearance from the other side, where you can see male hands, seeming to be touching or almost-touching the head and/or shoulders of the woman who's sucking his normal-sized dong. With some adjustments to its shape & proportions, it wouldn't be terrible as an abstract representation of love/sex/sensuality, with the head & dong absent specifically to make it abstract instead of explicit.

The problem would be naming this abstraction after somebody specific when there's nothing about it to tell or even suggest to an observer that it's supposed to be somebody specific and there's nothing about that specific person to point from him to this kind of imagery.

But, of course, that wasn't the intention so judging it by how well it did at that is pointless. What the artist was actually trying to do was recreate what (s)he apparently thought of as an iconic photograph which I don't recall having ever seen before:

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/...tin-luther-king-jr-coretta-ew-140p-7b61e4.jpg

The fact that they're awkwardly side-hugging to face the cameras instead of facing each other diminishes its impact because makes it less of an interaction between Martin & Coretta and more of a publicity pose, but it does explain why the positions in the statue are so strange. I was wondering at first why the shoulders were so narrow. They aren't narrow; they're just very angled.

It seems that the artist's main problem is that (s)he didn't realize that that photograph is not well enough known for just the arm positions alone without the heads to evoke it for the average observer.
 
Delvo said:
The problem would be naming this abstraction after somebody specific when there's nothing about it to tell or even suggest to an observer that it's supposed to be somebody specific and there's nothing about that specific person to point from him to this kind of imagery.

But, of course, that wasn't the intention so judging it by how well it did at that is pointless. What the artist was actually trying to do was recreate what (s)he apparently thought of as an iconic photograph which I don't recall having ever seen before:

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/...tin-luther-king-jr-coretta-ew-140p-7b61e4.jpg
The fact that they're awkwardly side-hugging to face the cameras instead of facing each other diminishes its impact because makes it less of an interaction between Martin & Coretta and more of a publicity pose, but it does explain why the positions in the statue are so strange. I was wondering at first why the shoulders were so narrow. They aren't narrow; they're just very angled.

It seems that the artist's main problem is that (s)he didn't realize that that photograph is not well enough known for just the arm positions alone without the heads to evoke it for the average observer.
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That explains a lot. The question is now, why did the artist choose to depict the somewhat odd side hug with only arms. Throw in the head and neck and it would at least make a little more sense. As is, from some angles you can make out that it is entwined arms but otherwise, its just weird.
 
The other thing that bugs me a little is -- did we really need yet another MLK statue? It reminds of when I lived Ithaca, New York, and people decided they were going to rename a major downtown road after a Black historical figure. Several native sons and daughters were under consideration -- heroes of the Underground Railroad, intellectuals, artists -- and I learned things about the town I didn't know. But the name they landed on was... MLK. Who I believe never set foot in the place. I was pretty disappointed they'd squandered such a valuable teaching opportunity.

It's a little like King has sucked all the air out of the civic memorial space. People talk about the miseducation of Black children, but they keep putting essentially this same statue up over and over so you'd think there were only a handful of Black historical figures worthy of commemoration. MLK, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Henrietta Lacks. And it's a disservice to those less well known but just as worthy.

So Ithaca got the seventeen thousandth MLK Drive... congrats? Not that he doesn't deserve the commemoration, I'm not saying that. But at this point it just feels like it's at the expense of almost anybody else.
 
Delvo said:
It seems that the artist's main problem is that (s)he didn't realize that that photograph is not well enough known for just the arm positions alone without the heads to evoke it for the average observer.
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In all honesty, I can think of only one arm position that is so closely associated with one individual that seeing it invariably brings that person to mind and I'm not sure that association isn't fading with younger generations.
 
I have nothing against abstract art, but a statue that is supposed to honor a great man is not the place for it,IMHO.
 
All this reminds me of when the Joe Louis Fist was unveiled in downtown Detroit. I seem to recall some controversy at the time, but the WP article says nothing.

Another statue of a disembodied part to honor someone...

Fred
 
Nowhere Man said:
All this reminds me of when the Joe Louis Fist was unveiled in downtown Detroit. I seem to recall some controversy at the time, but the WP article says nothing.

Another statue of a disembodied part to honor someone...

Fred
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I think there's a fair case to be made that a bloke who was only famous for his fists is accurately represented by a statue of a fist.

Mind you, according to the Right, MLK was the greatest cocksman since Casanova, so maybe his is appropriate.
 
Was he a great cocksman, or just a notorious philanderer? Maybe it's entirely on brand that the same piece evokes him hugging his wife and him swinging his dick around.
 
The Atheist said:
I'm firmly in the "don't know, don't care" camp on it. What and who people put their dick in is irrelevant in my morality unless a law is being broken.
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And yet you're the one who brought it up. In positive terms, no less.

Anyway, thanks for giving me pause to consider that maybe the artist knew exactly what they were doing, and exactly what mixed messages they were going to send. This might actually be a great work of art.
 
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