City profiles

Fearless Girl “The statue of the girl with her hands defiantly on her hips has become a tourist sensation” since it was planted opposite Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” sculpture on International Women’s Day last month, say Aaron Smith on CNN Money. But now a fierce controversy is raging over whether she should be removed. The veteran Italian sculptor Arturo Di Modica, who installed the snorting bull in front of the New York Stock Exchange in 1989, reckons she changes the positive message of his sculpture, which is “a better America and a better world”. The girl’s presence, according to his lawyer, makes the bull “representational of male dominance and Wall Street” instead. The Di Modica camp is now threatening to sue her sponsor, State Street Global Advisors, for copyright infringement, claiming it has profited from ads featuring both sculptures. “Men who don’t like women taking up space are exactly why we need the Fearless Girl,” tweeted NYC mayor Bill De Blasio. But “rarely do the cultural politics of late capitalism offer us such a lose-lose conflict,” said Owen Davis on Dealbreaker. com. The girl, after all, is central to State Street’s efforts to promote one of its financial products – the Gender Diversity Index ETF, which invests in companies “with a decent share of X chromosomes”. That raises a troubling question: “Do we side with a cynical marketing ploy whose social politics, though muddled, are basically noble?” Or “a celebrated work”, inspired by the 1987 stock market crash, that “now carries the full symbolic weight of tedious male fragility”?