Don’t Move the Bull

Fearless Girl, that marketing stunt gone wild, is gone from her spot facing down Charging Bull at the end of Broadway — but set to take a new home staring down the New York Stock Exchange by year’s end.

That’s all good — but why exactly does the city insist that the Bull follow along?

From the start, we’ve complained about the “Girl exploits Bull” dynamic. She’s a fine piece of art — but one commissioned for a purely commercial purpose, namely to promote a Boston bank’s “pro-woman” investment fund.

Charging Bull, by contrast, was created to symbolize (and cheer) the Financial District’s optimistic animal spirits after the 1987 crash. Artist Arturo Di Modica had no financial motive — he donated the work free of charge. (Indeed, it started as true “guerilla art,” whereas Fearless Girl was actually installed with the city’s OK.)

And he’s furious that Girl distorts his work — by turning it into a symbol of the sexism that she’s supposed to be facing down.

The city’s excuse for the moves is that the statues draw too many tourists, creating various crowd-control issues. Surely it’s at least worth seeing if moving one of them — the one that’s more popular at the moment, anyway — resolves that problem.

After all, the issue wasn’t pressing in all the decades that Charging Bull had that corner of Bowling Green to himself.

Fearless Girl can make her point just fine by confronting the Exchange building, without spitting on another artist’s work.

Leave the Bull be.