Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull (1989) is not a very good sculpture. It is cartoonish and overwrought and looks more like the mascot of a minor league baseball team than a selfrespecting civic monument. These shortcomings notwithstanding, this 7,100-pound talisman of American capitalism—equal parts sacred cow and golden calf—is almost certainly New York’s most photographed public artwork. If you throw a coin in the Trevi fountain, you will return to Rome. If you rub the testicles of this giant steer or, more specifically, if you are photographed doing so, you will become rich.
At Bowling Green, an astonishingly diverse queue of Charging Bull pilgrims regularly extends more than a block southward. As easy as it might be to disparage anyone willing to wait half an hour in the cold to get a photograph of themselves being tea-bagged by a pair of cantaloupe-sized bronze balls, it is impossible to deny the conviction/ potency of their enthusiasm.
We are not in a golden age of public sculpture in New York. The Public Art Fund and Creative Time have struggled to produce anything in the last decade that compares, for example, to the latter’s 2014 commission of Kara Walker’s extraordinary A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, but, twenty-first century contributions notwithstanding, the Financial District still has some of the city’s most iconic outdoor sculpture. There is no one waiting in line to be photographed with Isamu Noguchi’s Red Cube (1968) or Louise Nevelson’s Shadows and Flags (1977) or Mark di Suvero’s Joie de Vivre (1998). If I were to prostrate myself before a monument to corporate enterprise, Jean Dubuffet’s spectacular Group of Four Trees (1972) in Chase Manhattan Plaza, commissioned as a gift from David Rockefeller “to the bank and the downtown community” would be my first choice, but for the time being, to quote one of my Wall Street heroes, “I would prefer not to.”
Have a gap in your archive?