Slick as novelty soap, this is about vanity not protest
If we have learnt anything recently, it is that statues matter. For decades, we’ve ignored the public sculpture in our streets: nothing, the adage goes, is as invisible as a monument in bronze or marble. Not now, though; not in the light of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall.
In future histories of British art, the toppling of the statue of the 17thcentury slaver Edward Colston in Bristol will, I suspect, be written up as a watershed. The issue of who we collectively celebrate, by plonking likenesses of them on plinths, suddenly feels more urgent and important than ever before. Now, art is on our front pages, at the centre of national debate. And, for a critic like me, that’s exciting.
What isn’t exciting is this week’s attention-grabbing contribution to that debate from Marc Quinn – which seems, to me, more vainglorious stunt than high-minded protest art. He says that his ebony-coloured resin statue is a collaboration with the Black Lives Matter activist it represents, as though that legitimises him weighing in on such a vexed topic. But it doesn’t. Nobody asked Quinn to create his sculpture, which he installed stealthily overnight, without permission. And, frankly, the last person I want to hear from about Black Lives Matter is this wealthy, white 56-year-old notorious for churning out meretricious artworks designed to lure the super-rich.
Remember his solid 18-carat gold bauble of the model Kate Moss improbably bending her body in a contorted yoga pose?
Specialising in slick, glitzy work fit for the penthouse, Quinn is an artist for the one per cent. I can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, Jen Reid – powerful though she looks, with her fist raised – has been gobbled up by Quinn’s ego.
By contrast, when, in 2018, Gillian Wearing, the Turner Prize Winner, unveiled her quietly superb statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, it felt like a happy match of artist, subject, and execution.
And that’s before we analyse the artistic merits of Quinn’s statue. He’s right, of course, that the image posted on Instagram that inspired him is a powerful photograph. But memorialising it (albeit temporarily) by fanatically replicating it in three dimensions commits one of the cardinal sins of public sculpture: literalness.
Slick as a bar of novelty soap, this is a glossily produced but straightforwardly figurative, stylistically humdrum piece.
Ultimately, though, its poor quality is less of a problem than the point that this new effigy (like the old one) has been imposed arbitrarily and top-down. The replacement for Colston’s statue should emerge organically, with widespread local support.