Some Wall Street finance broseph
A new bronze statue had New Yorkers stopped in their tracks Tuesday as a “Fearless Girl” statue was strategically placed in front of Wall Street’s iconic bull.
The statue shows a young girl standing straight with her head held high as she stares down the bucking bull that has become synonymous with Wall Street and big business.
The statue was installed by State Street Global Advisors, a branch of Boston-based State Street Corporation, to send a powerful message about gender equality in the workplace.
The defiant girl was placed in the financial epicenter of the Big Apple to encourage more companies to add more women in leadership roles and in the male-dominated Wall Street.
I think the iconography of the bull is revolting, and not really made less so by adding a child for the bull to trample, but anyway. There are always worse things.
Almost as if out of central casting, some Wall Street finance broseph appeared and started humping the statue while his gross date rape-y friends laughed and cheered him on. He pretended to have sex with the image of a little girl. Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.
The message is: if a female is out in public, she’s there to be fucked. That’s all she’s for. Female=a thing men are supposed to fuck.
You can grab her by the pussy.
I can’t imagine one of my peer group humping a statue, let alone a statue of a little girl.
Yes, agreed, the scene is grotesque. WTF were the geniuses at State Global Advisers thinking?
Replace the little girl with a statue of a 9ft tall Amazon with a battle ax. The second photo is completely repellent.
To be clear, I quite like the bronze of the girl. It’s not only a lovely piece of work, I find it vaguely subversive. That may or may not have been the artists intent, but the juxtaposition of defiant frail humanity against the raging bull of the market is great. I suspect that the humper and his mates, in addition to casual misogyny and sociopathy, at some level get that the girl is sending a message that they, the market, is to be defied and controlled to the benefit of humanity. I bet they don’t like that.
I like the girl statue. Not surprised about the idiot trying to hump. It’s obviously threatening, which is bizarre.
Karma would be that all the men that the statue offends only have daughters who grow up to be physicists and philosophers so that any conversation they have will be terse with daddy always feeling intellectually inadequate.
#4 – I don’t think I’d wish these fathers on any daughters. I had a few too many of that sort in my life, and it makes it really tough being a girl.
As much as I appreciate the sentiment apparently behind the statue, something was bugging me about it… when I read this it pinpointed it for me: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fearless-girl-statue-wall-street_us_58c19095e4b0d1078ca4d223?
It’s ok for ‘girls’ to challenge power: it’s ‘cute’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘adorable’. ‘Girl power, hooray!’ Better than it was, maybe, and yet for a woman to do so is still anathema…
I don’t quite get the message in the little girl statue, bull markets are supposed to be ridden, not confronted. OB is right, if you stand in their way they will trample you, little girl or not, that’s the point. I think it’s a PR stunt anyway so they probably didn’t think about it too hard, mainly aiming for the viral image, but it is a bit annoying.
Yes, if you literally put a little girl in front of a raging bull it will almost certainly end badly. Art isn’t literal though, it’s pretty much the definition of figurative. One of the things I love about art is that it has an interpretive life of it’s own as a result of that figurative nature. The artist can intend a piece to mean something. The patron can intend a piece to mean something. As the viewer you can see something else.
I look at a moment frozen in time and see hope for humanity a frailty over the uncaring monstrosity of the Market. I see a message of defiance by the poor and powerless over the greedy, strong and cruel.
It doesn’t matter to me if the patron did not intend that message, or even the artist. I do wonder if the artist is having a sly joke at the expense of his patrons though. Regardless, for me, that is the message I choose to take. Suspend your disbelief brothers and sisters!
“I look at a moment frozen in time and see hope for humanity a frailty over the uncaring monstrosity of the Market. I see a message of defiance by the poor and powerless over the greedy, strong and cruel…
… Regardless, for me, that is the message I choose to take. ”
So… erasing women, except for using femaleness to signify frailty? Great.
No, fork. Rob said he saw that image of a girl child signifying humanity, humanity defiant.
1. ” but the juxtaposition of defiant frail humanity against the raging bull of the market is great.”
2. Think I read something on this blog before about how talking about pregnant people, instead of pregnant women, erases women and the oppression they suffer because they are women. How is this different? It’s an artwork about gender equality in the workplace, and some dude comes along and says, “Nah, I’m gonna look at it as not being about women, but people in general.”
3. Related to #2, let’s also talk about rejecting the explicit intent of the artist and patron. There’s interpreting a work when it’s open to interpretation, but this is not that. Sure, people will use things where it was clearly not intended to be used in that way by the creators (Native American headdresses, Pepe the Frog), but that’s not really cool, IMHO.
Ah no – it’s not the same at all. The usual when it comes to generalizations about humanity is to cite a male as typical – like those “ascent of man” figures of chimp-like silhouettes evolving into human male ones. Letting a small girl represent humanity overturns that.
But the usual when it comes to generalizations about abortion rights of course is not to cite a male as typical, because males don’t need abortion rights.
Ok, I don’t want this to become about me. I’m just not that interesting or important compared to the stuff that gets discussed on this blog. Regular readers here can judge for themselves whether my comments have value and are in good faith, taste, whatever.
That said, my white male, 6’2″ 220lb humanity is frail compared to the raging bull of the market (point 1).
It’s different because I’m talking in the figurative about art interpretation, not in the specific about real people (point 2).
Who are you to say the work and its context are not open to interpretation? How does my interpretation cross into cultural interpretation, other than Wall Street dude bro culture or self promoting corporate culture perhaps?
I stand by comment at 8, people can agree with it or not. Judge me to be fair dealing or not.
Rob,
“Who are you to say that the work and its context are not open to interpretation?
Of course they are. The work reminds me of an old cartoon where a mouse is giving the finger to an attacking eagle, the outcome of the encounter is not in doubt. I can’t see the ‘cultural appropriation’ element either. (I apologise to the Romans for culturally appropriating their alphabet). I’m an “Anglo-Saxon” so I’m also outraged when people culturally appropriate my native language, it must stop immediately.
Perhaps Esperanto could replace English….er….no, the creator of Esperanto culturally appropriated other Indo- European languages.
The figure defying the bull obviously should have been an hermaphrodite or asexual.
As an addendum about art being open to individual interpretation, I thought I’d share selected comments to an article announcing that ‘girl’ can stay…