The Italian sculptor who created the famous Charging Bull statue that lives in Bowling Green Park in New York’s Financial District is getting bent out of shape because he believes the new Fearless Girl statue is “changing the meaning” of his artwork.
But the Fearless Girl’s symbolic stare-down with Wall Street’s charging bull has morphed into a real world stand-off.
“They are transforming illegally the message of the bull,” said Arthur Piccolo, a spokesman for Arturo Di Modica, the Italian sculptor who made the bull as a symbol of hope.
“Now this girl is confronting this supposedly monstrous figure,” Piccolo said. “That’s an outrage — to take a great work of art and transform it.”
Arturo Di Modica illegally installed his bull sculpture a little before Christmas back in 1989. At the time, he had to campaign to get the city to keep the statue. It was inspired by the 1987 market crash and weighs around 7,000 lbs.
Arturo Di Modica first conceived of the Charging Bull as a way to celebrate the can-do spirit of America and especially New York, where people from all other the world could come regardless of their origin or circumstances, and through determination and hard work overcome every obstacle to become successful. It’s this symbol of virility and courage that Arturo saw as the perfect antidote to the Wall Street crash of 1986.
Unlike Di Modica, who reportedly funded the over $300,000 casting of his bronze bull himself, Fearless Girl was placed in front of Wall Street’s “Bull” a little less than a month ago to commemorate International Woman’s Day with the blessing of a Wall Street investment firm. As a result, it has been criticized by some as “corporate imaging.”
The statue, created by an artist named Kristen Visbal previously known for a series of larger-than-life sculptures of college football coaches, is an exercise in corporate imaging. It was put in place on the eve of International Women’s Day, March 8, by the investment firm State Street Global Advisors to celebrate “the power of women in leadership,” a message the company delivered, we might note with some irony, absent the depiction of an actual woman.
Di Marco seems to agree with this assessment.
"Women, girls, that’s great, but that’s not what that (my sculpture) is,” Di Modica said to MarketWatch. “I put it there for art. My bull is a symbol for America. My bull is a symbol of prosperity and for strength.”
Unfortunately for Di Modica, the meaning of his Charging Bull has been manipulated for the past 28 years by the corporate greed it symbolizes for most of us. And while the Fearless Girl may be the tone-deaf and unintentionally ironic brainchild of a Wall Street marketing department, it is ours to make meaningful.