It’s designed as an amusing sculpture that alludes to Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.
Scallops do not appear in the libretto, though, and the town in which the opera is set is unnamed, but it’s reasonable to assume that Britten had Aldeburgh somewhat in mind.
when one has to explain this … concept … over and over, and over, to more and more people
at some point one might review what the purpose of a “statue” is
Not more and more people, just a select (very) few.
So what’s with the ‘hair’? and the bush?
Really, I get it in theory’ but… it’s horrible.
There will be a large amount of people who don’t know who this is dedicated to.
Covered in graffit before the weeks out i’d wager.
It is a common mistake to think this woman is Mary Shelley.
She is her mother so understandable I suppose.
Did I mention, It’s ugly as f**k?
This looks like a Jeff Koons misshape.
I think they should have waited until after the quarantine to unveil it. Sculpture is very difficult to fully understand when one is limited to two dimensional renderings of it.
Nothing says 18th century feminist philosopher and all around badass like a (checks notes) “badly rendered generic nude woman rising from a blob of silvery weirdness.”
Hey, art is subjective. If you like it, great. I think the alternate choice was far better and spoke more clearly about what she was about, plus provided places for people to sit in her likeness and contemplate. But I’m staid and boring.
What does one mean by placing a statue of someone in a public place? A guy in a suit, with a name at the bottom, with perhaps a quote mentioning how kind and generous this man was, "See this man, he built hospitals (with the money he earned from selling slaves), "
The basic problem as I see it, Wollstonecroft rebelled against the conventional wisdom that a woman was “a wife, a mother, a schoolteacher”, and depicting her as a 18th woman who could be perceived by the viewer as falling into one of those categories ignores the real purpose in honoring her. A conventional statue seems inadequate to the task.
(There are those who might argue that the ordinary has been neglected. and it is the purpose of historians to illuminate the lives of those passed over by subsequent generations, but this seems to verge on circularity. Why remember Wollstonecroft in particular if she was but one of many? )
No, a proper monument to Wollstonecraft should be a cool piece of art, that invites the viewer to learn more about what she’s written. I suppose that one of the new requirements of public sculpture is that it should be selfie friendly, but traditionally, the 3 dimensionality of sculpture, and the interaction between viewer and object are what separates it from painting. I don’t own 3d goggles, and I cannot easily visit the site, so I cannot ascertain whether it’s a “cool piece of art.” I suspect that it will prove less successful that Hambling’s Scallop or “Rearing Wave.”
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