Who Owns Art?

Each week I try and send a mail to my team at Microsoft, focused on storytelling, or the art of communications, or what we might have learned in the previous week. There's been a lot of coverage about "Fearless Girl" last few days, which was the topic of my mail this past Friday...so I'm sharing a lightly edited version.

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Monday at midnight found me in the middle of the financial district of NYC. My Seattle-based brother happened to be arriving in NYC late Monday, so after seeing Groundhog Day we piled into a cab and headed down to meet him at the Holiday Inn Express there at the bottom of the island. We ended up having beer and pretzels (at least some of us had beer and pretzels, and some of the younger set had pretzels only) and then walking a few blocks over to see the Bull and the Girl. This was our second trip down to see the new statue, with the first trip being mid day and mobbed with people. There were fewer people at midnight, which gave us a chance to enjoy the art a bit more.

So who owns art, anyway? And who decides what it means? That question is front and center right now, spurred by the installation and reaction to “Fearless Girl.” The statue in question was supposed to be there for just a month – and to be a call to action and reminder that there are too few women in leadership positions on Wall Street. The statue, by the sculptor Kristen Visbal, was sponsored by an investment firm whose twenty-eight-person leadership team contains five women.

But what does it mean? Some people criticized both the art and the hypocrisy of the sponsorship. But people came to look at it, in large numbers. And what was supposed to be a month was extended to a year, in the same way that the Charging Bull (a rogue piece of art on its own) got a new lease on life. Today, that artist is asking the city to remove the girl, claiming the new statue changes the intent of his original art. Having seen the bull solo and now confronted by a new adversary, I tend to agree that the intent (rampant capitalism as unambiguously good thing) has been changed and challenged.

The New Yorker used Fearless Girl as the entry point into an essay about women’s ambitions and the challenges thereto. It’s not a long piece and is well worth the read. Here is a para that just leaped out at me:

In a spirited, cutting essay called “Snarling Girl,” the novelist Elisa Albert reorients the entire premise of “Double Bind.” “Maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I’m worth compared to anyone else,” she writes. She adds, “What I would like to say is Lean In my hairy Jewish ass.” Albert spells out the foolishness of trying to generalize about ambition: the desire to be a first-generation college student isn’t easily comparable to the desire to shatter a glass ceiling or own a luxury car or write a work of genius. “Our contexts are not the same, our struggles are not the same, and so our rebellions and complacencies and conformities and compromises cannot be compared.” To Albert, ambition is a quality that arises organically from both vanity and a genuine wish to do good work; it’s also something she regards as alien and horrific. “So you got what you wanted and now you want something else,” she writes. “You probably worked really hard; I salute you. . . . But if you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.” Albert’s essay is easily the most ambitious in the collection.

I spent 18 years in Portland, home of Beverly Cleary. I read Ramona stories to all my kids, and looking at the statue of “Fearless Girl” kept thinking about the statue of Ramona there in Pdx near Klickitat Street. Another fearless, troublesome, inquisitive girl, always getting into and out of trouble, or what I would call a very good role model. With this construct, I love the new statue on Wall Street and the placement and hope they don’t change it.

 At the same time, the essays called out in the New Yorker, and the point they used to close the story:

 It’s dismaying, and revealing, that this message is most easily conveyed through a figure of a girl—her skirt and ponytail blown back in the breeze, cheerfully unaware of the strained, exhausted, overdetermined future that awaits her.

 Also resonated with me. Where are the statues of confident difficult brave troublemaking women? So there is more to do.

 But back to my original point. Who decides what “Fearless Girl” stands for? Is she a corporate stooge? A symbol of anti-capitalism? We get to decide. Each of us, looking at the picture or standing at midnight on a cool spring night in NYC. We decide. Not the artist, not the advertising agency that conceived it, not the mayor, not another artist – us. Because once art is in the wild, it belongs to the people who experience it. I’m an optimist, so in this particular case I see hope for what can be, even if it’s not here yet. Your mileage may vary. 😊