Apparently the little bronze girl has bigger balls than Mr. Di Modica.

Disclosure: There is some bias in my opinion. Working in copyright I got sick to death years ago of self-aggrandizing artists constantly telling the rest of the world how much more important their thoughts and feelings are than ours.

The bitter, entitled man-child angle on display here is just icing on the cupcake for me. The precious, wounded little cupcake.

Except like a lot of people, you're assuming the 'Fearless Girl' is a legitimate work of art, making some kind of bold statement. In reality, it's just a clever advertisement.
Of course one of the things that makes a great ad is not obviously being an ad.
Anyway, under the circumstances, Di Modica has a totally valid point.

Sort of. His gripe, though, is really with Wall Street itself (the banks and corporations, not the road way). When he made it in 1987 the statue it symbolised the strength and power of America after the stock market crash. But it's use as a symbol for Wall Street, and the role of those companies in the 2008 recession has changed that. Fearless Girl would have made no sense in 1987, that it does now is the change that Di Modica should be lamenting.

Although worth noting, Charging Bull was installed without permission from anybody. Di Modica didn't ask anyone what they thought. Perhaps the makers of Fearless Girl misinterpreted that gesture as a respect for bold action.

And further, the idea that art and commerce are separate, or that they must be in order for art to be 'authentic' or 'true' is nonsense. 'Legitimate' art has always engaged with it's social environment and corporate sponsorship and messaging doesn't make this less of an art work than the Vatican's commissioning of the Sistine Chapel makes it non-art.

I'd argue that the validity of art is rooted in its intent. 'Fearless Girl' isn't simply a commission like the Sistine Chapel, it is the concept and product of an advertising firm, sculpted and placed to their specifications.

Now it's true that viewers can bring their own interpretations- as they have with both the Charging Bull and Fearless Girl, but the original intent remains. The irony here is that the Fearless Girl is more a product of the world of corporate greed than the Bull.

The dispute is reminiscent of Maya Lin's objections to various realist statues being plopped down next to her iconic Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. As an artist with a vision, she was totally right, Unfortunately for her, people (and politicians) like realist statues, I guess because they can identify with them more than with artistic vision.

Your argument is weak. The Sistine Chapel is the concept and product of the Vatican, painted to their specifications to promote their message and world view.

And that examples also undermines your second point about the primacy of the intent of an art work, because how much, really, do you need to know about the theological and political position of Pope Julius II and what he was aiming to communicate through the chapel (which had a very specific audience) to appreciate it. Is it no longer an authentic work because that context has been lost to the majority of people who view it?

I might be mis-reading this, but you seem to have a view that if people like it (realistic statues) or it's commercial (fearless girl) it's not really art. The idea of the artist as aesthetic visionary floating above political and financial concerns has always been a myth. It serves to legitimise the underpayment of artists who are expected to be 'doing it for love' but has very little grounding in the reality of how art is made or interacted with. Artists will, of course, have a view on what happens to their work once it leaves the studio. But the idea that they should have a veto on how the public interacts with public art (and both the Vietnam Memorial and Courageous Bull are public art) just doesn't fly.

Art is just entertainment for elitists, so of course it's not legitimate if the unwashed masses like it.

Art is the execution of purely creative expression. By its nature, some will 'get it', some won't. I suppose those who don't might consider that elitist, depending on the circumstance, but it's not necessarily the goal of the artist to create something that's widely liked. Advertisers on the other hand create to maximize exposure and profit. Their goal is to appeal to the unwashed masses as much as possible. If they can do it in the guise of 'art', double whammy shazammy.

Bah. I'm a hopeless idealist and even I don't think "purely creative expression" is ever really possible.

Anyway, *making* art isn't elitist -- it's one of the fundamental human activities -- what's elitist is when people set themselves up as cultural gatekeepers and declare their preferred forms of entertainment to be Legitimate Art while everyone else's are somehow lesser endeavors.

I agree that making art should be one of the fundamental human activities, unfortunately its importance is greatly diminished in our society. One reason art and art making has become so associated with elitism is because the creation and appreciation of art isn't something that's given due importance in our culture. So just like relying on junk food in a food desert, people are drawn to the most banal, manipulative works.
But the closest you'll find to 'purely creative expression' isn't Fearless Girl or Charging Bull or the rarefied canvases hanging in museums. It's the art made by regular people who just decide they need to make art for no other reason than that. The best, most important art is art that the artist makes for themselves, just because. Some ends up in museums and galleries, some never sees the light of day. But 'Fearless Girl' is definitely not this.

So the artist who trained in sculpture and worked hard to make this statue didn't really make art? I guess that means the sculptor who came up with the shape of the Coca Cola bottle also didn't really make art. "Soup Cans" is art, but the artist who needed money to live, the artist who designed that label Warhol recreated didn't really make art.

You live in a world full of art. Everything around you was designed by an artist.

If you prefer regular people with no art training, good for you, but what you seem to treat as a passion and fancy, other people treat as a real job that they studied long and hard to master. The thought behind the art may come from the soul, but the skill it takes to execute it comes only with training.

Coca Cola bottle, original Campbell's Soup cans- not art.
That's what we call 'industrial design', i.e. like the commercial jingle, created to serve a function, in this case a marketing function.
Art = created for its own sake.
Yeah, everyone has their own sense or definition of exactly what art is, this happens to be mine.

Is architecture a form of industrial design or art?

The former, definitely.

What if the building is so outlandish as to be unsafe for human habitation? Or causes nearby buildings to slowly roast in the California sun? Also, I hear that Farnsworth house that keeps appearing in films is torture to live in.

Maybe if that was the original intent, because that's making a statement that goes beyond or defies actual architectural function.
Certainly there are architectural works that kind of straddle the line and transcend function- Gothic cathedrals or Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia.

it's not necessarily the goal of the artist to create something that's widely liked.

Artists only make this claim after people dislike their work. Artists who put their work on display aren't doing it for themselves. If they were, they would keep their art private. Artists who display seek approval, and if they can't get good attention, they'll settle for bad attention. What they hate most is getting no attention.

At the core of every artist is a small child desperate for daddy or mommy to put their art up on the fridge and spend lots of time talking about it.

Well you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but reading this statement tells me that you might think you know something about the 'art world', but not much about actual artists or art, except for the occasional 'outrage' piece about someone like Di Modica or Anish Kapoor. Or maybe you just had a bad experience with an artist and it's some kind of personal grudge.
It's like saying all rock musicians are arrogant right-wing assholes because Ted Nugent.

Believe as you will.

My dismissal of Fearless Girl as a 'valid' or 'serious' work of art isn't because it's 'commercial' or popular. It's because it was not created by an artist as a work of art.
It is, in essence, an advertising billboard or TV commercial in the form of a bronze statue- appropriating an existing artwork to convey its message. Granted, some TV ads are as iconic and beloved as any film masterpiece, and I give full credit to McCann Worldgroup for cleverness in coming up with a pitch that transcends its original concept- surely the apotheosis of effective advertising (funny that they're the descendant of the firm Don Draper ends up working for when he comes up with the famous 'hilltop' Coke ad in Madmen. The catchy, hopeful jingle in that ad ended up as a popular song, not unlike the new life taken on by Fearless Girl).

So on the one hand Di Modica has a legitimate creative grievance about his work, as much as if McDonald's erected a set of golden arches over the charging bull.
On the other hand, sure, any artist who creates a public work of art (including Maya Lin) has to have a thick skin and just accept that the thing could end up something different than what they intended, covered by graffiti or ads or used as a jungle gym by little kids.

It's because it was not created by an artist as a work of art.

Kristen Visbal is not an artist? She wasn't creating a work of art? I think she's a better authority on that than you are. It's pretty presumptuous of you to argue that her work is not legitimate because it was commissioned. She posed her model, she shaped the clothes and the facial expression, and she owns the work (McCann only owns the specific casting at Wall Street, Visbal is considering making more).

Not to diminish her sculptural skills or her standing as an artist outside of this work (though I gotta say, at the risk of being elitist, that her work is pretty bland and kitschy), but even in this interview she concedes the work is a 'collaboration' between her and McCann. In this particular case, she's as much the artist as the composer who writes the jingle.

Of course a jingle is art. If it's not, then theme songs to shows aren't, nor are the shows, and forget about musical scores and the movies they appear in.

See my reply above re. coca cola bottles etc.
If it's made to serve a definable function it's 'craft', not art. Especially if it's made to serve someone else's function.

Is self-gratification a function?

Well obviously a term like 'self-gratification' has a certain implication.
I don't see art as being comparable to masturbation- entirely different parts of the brain are involved.
Although the two activities have been combined in a few different ways.

Also, regarding the Sistine Chapel, remember that art in that time was dependent on patronage. Comparing it with how art is created today is like apples vs. oranges. Artists like Michelangelo managed to execute their artistic visions within the confines of the expectations and priorities of their times. The thematic content may have been dictated by the pope and the church, but the visual conveyance- execution and final product- was definitively Michelangelo, and other than being painting instead of sculpture, totally consistent with his body of work.

You're doing some assuming of your own.

The artistic merits of the girl statue and the intent of its creators are irrelevant to my point, as are the comparative artistic merits of Di Modica's bull.

We could argue our respective interpretations of what legitimizes works of art, what precludes an advertisement from being art or how bold a statement must be to deserve any place in any argument, but those factors are irrelevant to my original point as well.

Too many artists fail to grasp this abundantly simple point: once you release a piece of art you cannot control how others use it or how others choose to see it.

The Copyright Act protects several activities as the exclusive rights of a work's creator and offers legal remedies if those rights are infringed. For every other perceived offense against their creations artists have only one reliable defense. To accept the unchangeable fact that other people get to express themselves too and to act like a grownup when that happens.

Di Modica is whining.

In fact I fully agree with the idea that an artist who creates a public work should fully expect for it to be misinterpreted, altered, defaced, appropriated, urinated on, etc, especially plunked down on a busy corner of lower Manhattan.
I'm not saying he's entitled to redress, just that I understand his beef. From the point of view of McCann Worldgroup, the corporation that created the Fearless Girl, this is the best thing ever.

It's good for everybody. Most people are hearing Di Modica's name for the first time.

I wondered about this when it first came out.

I like the statue. Unfortunately, State Street could also improve their diversity.

Board of Directors 3 of 11 (27%)

SSGA Leadership Team 5 of 28 (18%)

The more publicity it gets, the more probable it'll be vandalized by some MRA shithead.

That would be an impressive feet, considering that since 9/11/2001 that plaza has been guarded 24/7 by M16-toting police officers.

"Men who don’t like women taking up space are exactly why we need the Fearless Girl." - Bill de Blasio