‘Look but don’t touch” used to be the well-understood rule for public monuments and artworks. Increasingly, though, even “look but don’t molest” is too subtle. Selfie-wrought pratfalls and literal groping of public treasures is causing further despair about over-touristing and its sometimes destructive excesses.
In Dublin, a months-long trial posting security staff to protect the black bronze statue of Molly Malone from having her cleavage mauled has proven an abject failure. Despite the wardens’ verbal warnings, handsy visitors have continued to paw, further damaging the statue’s surface.
Dublin’s council will now try fortifying it with sturdy flower planters. They’d better be filled with stinging nettles, aggressive thistles and cacti, and perhaps mini water canons.
The debacle has highlighted yet another stream of modern angst over public artworks: are some too sexualised?
In vain have history-conscious bystanders pointed out that the Malone statue’s frontage is gratuitously inaccurate and that the 1988 tribute should be replaced. They argue that Malone, the probably fictional subject of the famous ballad (c1876), would have been tiny, and dressed modestly and practically for the job of selling shellfish.
And fair play: would she really have risked getting crustacea, alive, alive oh or otherwise, down the front of her frock?
A similar debate has now been concluded in Copenhagen, where a secondary and more emphatically busty monument to Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid is to be removed – again because of what authorities deem too much perving.
Unlike the demurely crouching original Little Mermaid statue on the Langelinie promenade, the newer version is ebullient and rocks at least a double-D cup. A local restaurateur bestowed the back-up statue in 2006, siting it just a few hundred metres from the original. After public feedback that it was a bit crude, it was moved kilometres away to the city’s sea fort. City chiefs have now decided it’s not in keeping with the fort either and are removing it altogether.
The restaurateur is stung by the criticism – including that the mermaid’s posterior is too ample – arguing she is perfectly proportioned given the statue’s 3.9m height.
Still, as Florence’s Uffizi, among other illustrious galleries, has found, it doesn’t matter how perfectly proportioned the artwork, selfie-takers are always willing to improve upon it with the addition of themselves – sometimes by actual insertion.
In a recent mishap, a visitor trying to emulate Ferdinando de’ Medici’s haughty portrait pose fell backwards onto the canvas, tearing the Tuscan prince’s boot. His nibs had been painted seated, but the selfie-taker had tried to assume the same pose without benefit of a chair.
Worse befell an actual chair, a delicate crystal exhibit in Verona, when a tourist fancied himself capable of suspending his butt over the chair for a mock-sitting selfie. He wasn’t, as the resulting rubble attested.
Many galleries ban the selfie-stick, fairly judging it a hazard to exhibits and visitors. But there is a fear that banning photography, as many would like to do, could gut visitor numbers.
With climate activists now liable to use artworks for protest vandalism, it would appear a lot of gallery visitors aren’t really in it for the art.
The Uffizi is contemplating restrictions. Photography is already banned outright by Madrid’s Prado and New York’s Frick Collection.
But Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson has defended visitors’ snaps and selfies as the new reality of art appreciation. He says they create a valuable dialogue between art curators and the public.
So, will art increasingly be viewed less through a glass darkly than through a lens solipsistically?
Meanwhile, it’s worth reflecting on the dubiety of bickering over the physical proportions of fictional women, given how many real-life men have been painted and sculpted misleadingly to look tall and imposing.
