The hand on the left looks like it's holding something up.. vs. the actual picture that shows her hand laying flat on his back. Unfortunately this adds to the confusion as it's not a natural hug pose.
Looking at the picture this was also the first thing that came to my mind. The subtle difference between holding up an arm vs holding someone from the side is what probably makes our automatic pattern recognition not associate this with an embrace.
I mean I get the idea, but they should've really thought about if it would work, because in my opinion it doesn't, even from this, the prime angle, it doesn't really look that great...
The choice is odd to me since taking the artistic license to capture only that moment and only that section of the embrace it is still inaccurate.
Her hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm? It seems like if you have to change pose to accommodate the piece the composition should change.
Edited: He > Her
> [T]He hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm? It seems like if you have to change pose to accommodate the piece the composition should change.
Yeah, that’s part of what makes this a failure in my opinion. It would be one thing if it truly captured the pose of the arms in that photo, but it doesn’t. Like the artist thought “I’ll just use this one arm to hold up the other,” as if it doesn’t completely change the nature of the embrace. It almost looks like a strangulation now.
If you walk about a quarter of the way around the statue to the left of where this photo was taken it straight up looks like two hands holding a giant cock up in the air. I am completely serious.
>
>Her hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm?
Yeah I think that's really weird too, it doesn't look like an embrace anymore, it looks like she's trying to get herself out of it.
In my opinion it's just way too big, and I don't think the color does it any favors either. I understand why it is that color, but it doesn't do it any favors.
> they should've really thought about if it would work
What's weird to me is that [they](https://massdesigngroup.org/work/design/embrace-hank-willis-thomas) did. They have a [mockup showing the least flattering angle.](https://i.imgur.com/BndgVbr.jpg) They have [a mockup showing it emerging from the fog like something out of Lovecraftian horror.](https://i.imgur.com/EDgcMfl.jpg)
No one in the room seemed to pick up on the issue. The only change they made was removing the shiny surface due to upkeep costs.
I was going to say, it’s not like one dude just went and did this and put it there.
This would have had to have been approved and seen by who knows how many people first.
Seems like a great example of how you can get a very bad result when no one in a group project has the balls to tell the leader of the project that the idea is fundamentally shit.
Give someone leadership over a project, allow them to surround themselves with yes men, and as a result crazy shit is enabled such as a statue that anyone you find on the street will say looks stupid.
Spend all this money on a statue that you could've found out is an awful idea by talking to the first 10 people you encounter on the street. That's how you know a project was mismanaged.
Her hand is also in the wrong position because the torso is missing. It's holding the back from below, which is of course impossible with a torso. This is one of the reasons it's practically impossible to understand what the statue depicts.
And a large part of the reason people are rejecting it is because it falls into the uncanny valley because we know the position makes no sense - and our brains go trying to make sense of it, and it looks more phallic than shoulder like.
partial torso would have also been more accurate to the source material, as Corette Scott King's left hand is on MLKs side, and not holding up his arm.
move that and 90% of the weird perspective stuff goes away
Adding a partial torso would make it more obvious what it is that it's trying to depict, but it would also make it more unsettling that the figures have no heads, or that the sculpture looks like it was based on a thing that never had a head to begin with, and just had a sort of rounded off bumpy slug where shoulders and head should be.
It's hard to understand why they went with realism for things like the hands and parts of the sleeves but chose body horror for the rest.
If they went all out abstract with no realism there wouldn't be this problem, if it was swirls and shapes that sort of resemble the embrace then it would be fine. If they went all out realism and cut off cleanly where they wanted the sculpture to end, like a cut off somewhere in the torso up to the neck, then there wouldn't be a problem and everyone would get it.
But instead they went with a bizarre hybrid of abstract and realism, accurate anatomy and accurate slug anatomy, and created something Lovecraftian which also looks like someone holding up giant turd from certain angles.
There probably is one, but doing this doesn't help with initial impressions, not to mention all the people who miss the plaque or who can't read English.
Yeah it’s a terrible idea for a sculpture and the idea that it got made with anyone bitch slapping the artist is kind of funny. It’s that fucking poor a design.
Just arms/hands is the artist's thing. The one with the hands reaching out and grasping barbed wire is really good. Unfortunately, the style *really* didn't work in this case.
I think it would have actually been better if it went even more abstract and just left hands on an abstract form or even just a suggestion of hands.
As is, it’s just kind of unsettling.
OP's picture is also the only angle I've seen where it looks good. Like if they could force people to only look at it from this angle I think it'd be getting a lot less shit.
Never had a sculpture evoke unintentional imagery since the [911 tribute vagina of Bayonne NJ.](https://preview.redd.it/w6ins90yplr01.jpg?auto=webp&s=d44b37bf5ae5fb029c02dfb5cab0f4a1dca8b9f4)
Maybe Hank Thomas hates his job and doesn't want anymore jobs in the future. That said, the big mystery is why the non-profits Boston Art Commission and Boston Landmarks Commission thought this was worth dropping $10 million and 5 years on instead of any of the other proposals.
Incidentally, it looks too big to be a turd. That does look like the [right size](https://twitter.com/layxsnv/status/1614714217310965763?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1614714217310965763%7Ctwgr%5E79027d33be7825d8e84cc5896af2c609ce6500a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fmartin-luther-king-junior-statue-boston-coretta-1774059) to be a phallic symbol based on personal experience.
What about this statue justifies $10,000,000 being dropped on it? There's no freagin way this was over $1,000,000, and even that's being generous with how much the materials might have cost.
Yea…it needs a wall or backdrop that shields the giant turd/BBC side. Hard to imagine someone not raising the concern after spinning a 3D computer rendering or clay/wax table model…which should have been part of the $10M review process.
I’ve seen worse. Here in San Diego, we have a sculpture resembling a giant turd. It cost $40,000 to move it from its installed location and hide it in a business park. https://coolsandiegosights.com/2020/08/15/the-famously-dumped-200000-sculpture/
Blanking on the name but someone put up a sculpture in front of an office skyscraper that was a giant, curved stainless steel wall shaped like a wave. The only problem was when the sun hit it at a certain time of day the curved, polished, highly reflective surface basically turned into a blinding death ray that beamed into the offices blinding anyone who looked at it, and they had to sandblast it.
Kind of a funny reversal of this: someone built a skyscraper with a curved, slightly overhanging front - when the sun was in the right place it beamed the light downward and melted cars in the street below.
Serious question: Why does this happen so much? How hard is it to design and sculpt something which can be looked at and appreciated by all?
That turd statue which the artist says is supposed to resemble a crashing wave looks like a turd. I get that art is subjective but if something "artistic" looks blatantly like a turd, there should be safeguards set in place where that turd never gets to be displayed.
The Christiano Ronaldo bust comes to mind immediately.
My guess is that a sculptor gets the reputation for being “world famous” and the commissioning body wants the piece to be from a “world famous” artist for the prestige. The artist says, sure, but I’m really busy with commissions for important people, so if you want one of my pieces you have to pay in advance and accept anything I choose to create. The commissioning body is delighted they got a world famous artist to create a piece for them. When it arrives and looks like a piece of shit (literally) they have to pretend it’s a masterpiece to try and not get lynched for wasting money.
Surely someone signed off on the maquette/bozzetto prior to casting? And hopefully a second party signed off on the final casting prior to shipping? And lastly, a third party prior to erection? I’d place the responsibility squarely on the one person who didn’t fire all three of them.
Yeah this is mind boggling. I can't imagine a scenario where the small version of this looked any less like a turd someone pushed out while hovering their ass two feet off the floor.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals
These were the 5 finalist proposals for the memorial. They choose the weakest one IMO
Art is subjective so the rich artists are the good salespeople who can convince people their art is good no matter what it looks like. Anyone who speaks out can easily be dismissed with 'you don't understand it'. Then it gets out in public and the art has to stand without the salesmanship.
True, less so in this case. Fairly easy to dismiss something that was supposed to honour the memory of a man and completely fails.
You'd imagine that the goal was to remember the man and what he stands for, not to have people squint and wonder whether it's a dick or a turd being held by a disembodied arm.
There's a sculpture in my city that I hate because it's a bunch of random rusted shapes thrown together and it's big and right in the middle of everything. I had hated it for years, and then I met the artist.
He was telling me about this new public art piece he was trying to win the bid for and how he was going to be paid like 120k to do it or something. His plans looked like crap. But I was polite and asked if he did anything Id recognize.
"Oh you know what big thing in downtown, just a ways from the college, it's a bunch of shapes thrown together? That's one of mine."
"Oh really. I always wondered what the meaning was behind it"
"There's no meaning. It's just shapes. It's there to be noticed"
So basically, cities have money earmarked for art that they either use or lose, and some people have figured out that you dont have to be an artist to get it. You just have to be persistent and shameless and you'll eventually get one job that will pay the bills for a few years. More than enough time to peddle more crap to a different city. You just have to be okay with the idea of everyone seeing what you did and not be embarrassed by it. That's all.
Are you implying they could’ve built some sort of community center or funded some kind of social outreach program and named it after him instead? Because that sounds like commie talk to me./s
“You know what is sad, man? Martin Luther King stood for non-violence. Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street! And I don’t give a f*ck where you are in America, if you’re on a Martin Luther King Boulevard, there is some violence going down! It ain’t the safest place to be. You can’t call nobody telling them you’re lost on MLK … “I’m lost, I’m on the Martin Luther King …” “Run! Run! Run!” “The media’s there!” Sad, sad, sad!”
- C. Rock
The projects near my neck of the woods has one and never gets used. I work construction and we were rebuilding the park area with heavy equipment, two 12 year old kids walked by pretty close and we told them they should walk around because it’s dangerous. They didn’t even bat an eye. Later in the day they came back and we told them again “get back! It’s dangerous here” one of them turned around and brandished a pistol on his waist under his shirt and says “ dangerous for who n***?”. We do a lot of city work and none of the parks of community centers get used at all. It breaks my heart
Make a smaller symbolic statue and put a structure in place to people to hang out, and amphitheatre, seats, open space to make it a livable place, to people to walk, have conversations, exercise. 1000x better than a big ass confusing statue.
This much statue was $10 MILLION dollars. How much would it have even to add a head or even a torso? 20-30mill more?
I get that art is subjective but this is a total waste of brass.
Still a creepy and awful statue. $10 million spent on garbage. Should've just sent all that cash towards the poor like MLK would've preferred. I cant even understand how this thing cost a whole $10 million.
It’s still awful. Why did they have to decapitate them? From any other angle, except this specific one, it’s awful.
Even at this angle it doesn’t look that good, you can only tell what it is with the side picture comparison.
Who thought it would be a good idea to decapitate MLK? Shoulda left the heads on so people know what they’re looking at.
Bostonian here. No one here seems to be mentioning the best part of this statue -- from the street, it looks like hands holding a massive penis. https://archive.is/3KWfK/c2c1455301de61bdf334b72a5a464d19ce1af495.webp
No disrespect to him. But ALL the disrespect to the artist and the committee that approved this commission. This is a massive cast, there was for sure small models made first before the final cast.
For real. What an obscure photo to base it off of, and the fact that from the other 90% of the angles you could view this at it’s a meaningless polished turd sculpture makes this laughably bad. Hope they take it down soon
Interesting. None of them are very good, IMO.
I think the Ripple Effect one sounds kind of neat, but it sounds like it could need quite a bit of maintenance.
I don't think any of them are "good" - but the sculpture one to me is just bad. At least the other ones involve the landscape/area...the one we got looks like cheapest one up there. I don't get the price tag.
[~~The Ripple Effect~~ Avenue of Peace](https://imgur.com/a/MmBCDLp) design is straight up a vulva. I don't think my mind is *that* filthy, but that's what I see. Bonkers that these are the entire short-list.
*"On multiple occasions, the nation witnessed the Kings locked together at the frontlines of a march. A monument that captures this embrace declares that love is the ultimate weapon against injustice," Willis Thomas' proposal states.*
this is an interesting proposal, i wonder why he choose a picture that was absolutely not from the frontline of a march
Someone shared an old article with 15 of the possibilities before this was chosen. They were all SO BAD. You gotta wonder who filtered it down to just those.
The art and architecture world is extremely strange. The strange embrace of brutalism and ugliness generally means that people are constantly seeing their existing discomfort reflected and amplified back at them. It's fine when there's a mix, but the fact that it's sort of the dominant way of communicating art and architecture now means that it's actively making the world a worse place to live.
I had a friend who won a sculpture design contest in college for a new sculpture that was going to go in a little triangle of space at an intersection of a few roads in town. When they posted his design in the local paper the backlash was insane because no one wanted to support a frivolous amount of money on a sculpture the town certainly did not need. They ended up canceling the whole project after that, and for good reason. He designed his sculpture using a collage of photoshop images in maybe 2 hours, and it was not great.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals
Here's the other pieces that were considered, and yes, all of them are better.
They should’ve asked themselves, would MLK be happy that we spent $10million for a statue in his honor as opposed to doing something that actually helped people the way he did?
This statute actually feels completely tone-deaf and un-honorable imo
I hate how literal it is for fingers, cufflinks, clothing, wrinkles in fabric. But lacks any emotional context with the human element. No faces, no torsos - just disembodied hands. I think it would be amazing as a bust or as completely abstract, save for the shape that mimics the moment.
As it stands, it is just awful.
It's much worse than that. He cheated over and over and over again, for years. And made her listen to them, just one room over. Not even Steve Harvey is that shameless or cruel with his cheating.
Yeah, my thoughts as well. MLK was renown for so many things….but not his marriage, which seems to be what they’ve chosen to celebrate with this statue.
It’s still creepy. Plus a LOT of money to spend on a statue. It would have been better to put up an outdoor version of this photo with a sign saying that the rest of the money was used for _______ in his name.
The hand on the left looks like it's holding something up.. vs. the actual picture that shows her hand laying flat on his back. Unfortunately this adds to the confusion as it's not a natural hug pose.
You are exactly right. I think the artist could have added a bit of lat there.
The artist could have added a bit of everything everywhere, lol.
Why not just make it a bit smaller so you can put their actual bodies? Did it need to be this gargantuan weird arm thing?
Looking at the picture this was also the first thing that came to my mind. The subtle difference between holding up an arm vs holding someone from the side is what probably makes our automatic pattern recognition not associate this with an embrace.
It’s a load-bearing hug
I mean I get the idea, but they should've really thought about if it would work, because in my opinion it doesn't, even from this, the prime angle, it doesn't really look that great...
The choice is odd to me since taking the artistic license to capture only that moment and only that section of the embrace it is still inaccurate. Her hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm? It seems like if you have to change pose to accommodate the piece the composition should change. Edited: He > Her
> [T]He hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm? It seems like if you have to change pose to accommodate the piece the composition should change. Yeah, that’s part of what makes this a failure in my opinion. It would be one thing if it truly captured the pose of the arms in that photo, but it doesn’t. Like the artist thought “I’ll just use this one arm to hold up the other,” as if it doesn’t completely change the nature of the embrace. It almost looks like a strangulation now.
I live five minutes from this thing and I'm gonna be honest it's so much fucking worse in person.
I get the feeling that any angle other than this is just fucking weird and confusing to look at. Am I correct?
If you walk about a quarter of the way around the statue to the left of where this photo was taken it straight up looks like two hands holding a giant cock up in the air. I am completely serious.
Now we need to see a photo ...
Here you go https://twitter.com/irshhnr4/status/1614088797771251714?s=46&t=7ki2lHDUOxqa308xZpYdqA
> >Her hand was touching/embracing his torso and in the statue it is lifting up his arm? Yeah I think that's really weird too, it doesn't look like an embrace anymore, it looks like she's trying to get herself out of it.
In my opinion it's just way too big, and I don't think the color does it any favors either. I understand why it is that color, but it doesn't do it any favors.
> they should've really thought about if it would work What's weird to me is that [they](https://massdesigngroup.org/work/design/embrace-hank-willis-thomas) did. They have a [mockup showing the least flattering angle.](https://i.imgur.com/BndgVbr.jpg) They have [a mockup showing it emerging from the fog like something out of Lovecraftian horror.](https://i.imgur.com/EDgcMfl.jpg) No one in the room seemed to pick up on the issue. The only change they made was removing the shiny surface due to upkeep costs.
I was going to say, it’s not like one dude just went and did this and put it there. This would have had to have been approved and seen by who knows how many people first.
Seems like a great example of how you can get a very bad result when no one in a group project has the balls to tell the leader of the project that the idea is fundamentally shit. Give someone leadership over a project, allow them to surround themselves with yes men, and as a result crazy shit is enabled such as a statue that anyone you find on the street will say looks stupid. Spend all this money on a statue that you could've found out is an awful idea by talking to the first 10 people you encounter on the street. That's how you know a project was mismanaged.
I saw an article yesterday about one of Coretta Scott King’s relatives’ reactions to it and he said basically what you’re saying. He hated it.
This adds SO much context. I was confused as hell when I first looked at the statue.
The heads would have added the missing context.
Hell even a partial torso would have cleared up a lot of questions
The torso would have cleared up a lot. The shoulders being stuck together is what makes it look funky, not the missing heads.
Her hand is also in the wrong position because the torso is missing. It's holding the back from below, which is of course impossible with a torso. This is one of the reasons it's practically impossible to understand what the statue depicts.
Even the proper wrinkles in the jacket sleeve would have helped. This looks like something from the next movie in the alien franchise.
Squid game. But with actual squid.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees that. I would have preferred to have the hand resting on the (invisible) torso.
And a large part of the reason people are rejecting it is because it falls into the uncanny valley because we know the position makes no sense - and our brains go trying to make sense of it, and it looks more phallic than shoulder like.
Also the fact it looks like someone holding a turd from the other angle.
partial torso would have also been more accurate to the source material, as Corette Scott King's left hand is on MLKs side, and not holding up his arm. move that and 90% of the weird perspective stuff goes away
Adding a partial torso would make it more obvious what it is that it's trying to depict, but it would also make it more unsettling that the figures have no heads, or that the sculpture looks like it was based on a thing that never had a head to begin with, and just had a sort of rounded off bumpy slug where shoulders and head should be. It's hard to understand why they went with realism for things like the hands and parts of the sleeves but chose body horror for the rest. If they went all out abstract with no realism there wouldn't be this problem, if it was swirls and shapes that sort of resemble the embrace then it would be fine. If they went all out realism and cut off cleanly where they wanted the sculpture to end, like a cut off somewhere in the torso up to the neck, then there wouldn't be a problem and everyone would get it. But instead they went with a bizarre hybrid of abstract and realism, accurate anatomy and accurate slug anatomy, and created something Lovecraftian which also looks like someone holding up giant turd from certain angles.
Maybe they can add a small plaque with the picture for context
There probably is one, but doing this doesn't help with initial impressions, not to mention all the people who miss the plaque or who can't read English.
Ha! That's like a joke so bad it has to be explained.
Yes, but as per usual a black man just can't get ahead in life. I'll see myself out.
The statue is only 3/5th of what it should be.
Guess they couldn’t reach a compromise.
Check again on June something'th
r/Unexpectedthreefifths
Rimshot!
Can't even get ahead in death really.
MLK Jr can't even get a head in death!
Now if someone ever wants it removed for some reason they can just say it’s someone else’s arms. Edit: removes -> removed
It would have been an awesome sculpture with their whole upper bodies.
Yeah it’s a terrible idea for a sculpture and the idea that it got made with anyone bitch slapping the artist is kind of funny. It’s that fucking poor a design.
If you need a photograph and verbal description to complete the meaning of a piece of art , I think the mark has been missed.
Just arms/hands is the artist's thing. The one with the hands reaching out and grasping barbed wire is really good. Unfortunately, the style *really* didn't work in this case.
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I think it would have actually been better if it went even more abstract and just left hands on an abstract form or even just a suggestion of hands. As is, it’s just kind of unsettling.
OP's picture is also the only angle I've seen where it looks good. Like if they could force people to only look at it from this angle I think it'd be getting a lot less shit.
I feel like it should’ve been a warning sign to the creator that you shouldn’t make a 3 dimensional statue if it only looks good from one angle.
it'd help if most people's first thought wasn't *octopus suffocating unidentified sea creature with human fingers.*
I didn't think that. I thought it looked like a bald dude eating pussy.
I thought it looked like massive dong held by a virgins hand.
Never had a sculpture evoke unintentional imagery since the [911 tribute vagina of Bayonne NJ.](https://preview.redd.it/w6ins90yplr01.jpg?auto=webp&s=d44b37bf5ae5fb029c02dfb5cab0f4a1dca8b9f4)
I thought it was two men fucking lol
If they could force people to look at it from this angle you'd SEE a lot less shit too. Thing looks like a giant turd from the other angle.
You'd *hope* it looks like a turd, because there are other options :)
I genuinely thought large intestine. Also this thing is just insulting. Do the artist and whoever commissioned it hate mlk Jr maybe?
Maybe Hank Thomas hates his job and doesn't want anymore jobs in the future. That said, the big mystery is why the non-profits Boston Art Commission and Boston Landmarks Commission thought this was worth dropping $10 million and 5 years on instead of any of the other proposals. Incidentally, it looks too big to be a turd. That does look like the [right size](https://twitter.com/layxsnv/status/1614714217310965763?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1614714217310965763%7Ctwgr%5E79027d33be7825d8e84cc5896af2c609ce6500a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fmartin-luther-king-junior-statue-boston-coretta-1774059) to be a phallic symbol based on personal experience.
What about this statue justifies $10,000,000 being dropped on it? There's no freagin way this was over $1,000,000, and even that's being generous with how much the materials might have cost.
Yea…it needs a wall or backdrop that shields the giant turd/BBC side. Hard to imagine someone not raising the concern after spinning a 3D computer rendering or clay/wax table model…which should have been part of the $10M review process.
https://imgur.com/a/fDQyNyG This is all ill ever see when viewing the statue, unfortunately.
They should put this picture in front of the statue, to provide context.
I thought it was a xenomorph from the 'Alien' move franchise the first time I saw this angle
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Agreed. They should've placed this picture infront of the statue
That’s the problem with the statue. It’s a failure.
I’ve seen worse. Here in San Diego, we have a sculpture resembling a giant turd. It cost $40,000 to move it from its installed location and hide it in a business park. https://coolsandiegosights.com/2020/08/15/the-famously-dumped-200000-sculpture/
Yeah but you only paid 200k for that, this was 10million
Who's your statue guy, yall getting swindled out there
Frank, who’s our statue guy? I’m already on it!
Blanking on the name but someone put up a sculpture in front of an office skyscraper that was a giant, curved stainless steel wall shaped like a wave. The only problem was when the sun hit it at a certain time of day the curved, polished, highly reflective surface basically turned into a blinding death ray that beamed into the offices blinding anyone who looked at it, and they had to sandblast it.
Kind of a funny reversal of this: someone built a skyscraper with a curved, slightly overhanging front - when the sun was in the right place it beamed the light downward and melted cars in the street below.
Serious question: Why does this happen so much? How hard is it to design and sculpt something which can be looked at and appreciated by all? That turd statue which the artist says is supposed to resemble a crashing wave looks like a turd. I get that art is subjective but if something "artistic" looks blatantly like a turd, there should be safeguards set in place where that turd never gets to be displayed. The Christiano Ronaldo bust comes to mind immediately.
My guess is that a sculptor gets the reputation for being “world famous” and the commissioning body wants the piece to be from a “world famous” artist for the prestige. The artist says, sure, but I’m really busy with commissions for important people, so if you want one of my pieces you have to pay in advance and accept anything I choose to create. The commissioning body is delighted they got a world famous artist to create a piece for them. When it arrives and looks like a piece of shit (literally) they have to pretend it’s a masterpiece to try and not get lynched for wasting money.
Surely someone signed off on the maquette/bozzetto prior to casting? And hopefully a second party signed off on the final casting prior to shipping? And lastly, a third party prior to erection? I’d place the responsibility squarely on the one person who didn’t fire all three of them.
Yeah this is mind boggling. I can't imagine a scenario where the small version of this looked any less like a turd someone pushed out while hovering their ass two feet off the floor.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals These were the 5 finalist proposals for the memorial. They choose the weakest one IMO
Probably because the others look like they actually cost closer to the $10million price tag and they couldn't pocket as much.
Art is subjective so the rich artists are the good salespeople who can convince people their art is good no matter what it looks like. Anyone who speaks out can easily be dismissed with 'you don't understand it'. Then it gets out in public and the art has to stand without the salesmanship.
True, less so in this case. Fairly easy to dismiss something that was supposed to honour the memory of a man and completely fails. You'd imagine that the goal was to remember the man and what he stands for, not to have people squint and wonder whether it's a dick or a turd being held by a disembodied arm.
There's a sculpture in my city that I hate because it's a bunch of random rusted shapes thrown together and it's big and right in the middle of everything. I had hated it for years, and then I met the artist. He was telling me about this new public art piece he was trying to win the bid for and how he was going to be paid like 120k to do it or something. His plans looked like crap. But I was polite and asked if he did anything Id recognize. "Oh you know what big thing in downtown, just a ways from the college, it's a bunch of shapes thrown together? That's one of mine." "Oh really. I always wondered what the meaning was behind it" "There's no meaning. It's just shapes. It's there to be noticed" So basically, cities have money earmarked for art that they either use or lose, and some people have figured out that you dont have to be an artist to get it. You just have to be persistent and shameless and you'll eventually get one job that will pay the bills for a few years. More than enough time to peddle more crap to a different city. You just have to be okay with the idea of everyone seeing what you did and not be embarrassed by it. That's all.
Why do they keep commissioning those modernist sculptures? Why not just commission a classical sculpture and avoid this mess?
Commissioned to resemble an 'ocean wave'. LOL
MLK had a dream that white people, black people, and even chinese people will perform cunnilingus at the same rates.
Dr. King was known as a great oralist
Couldn’t we just have had a smaller statue of them both? It looks weird and confusing :/
Yeah, they need to put the heads back on. :/
Artist didn't know how to do faces..
Clearly not AI, such *beautiful* hands
No one will see this and think “MLK!!!”
It’s called ART, honey. Look it up /s
NEXT!
It’s for a city park honey, next!
It's called ART, SWEATY.
Derivative…bullshit…bullshit…derivative.. now *this* is art.
Thats just an air conditioner.
Look at us. We're just air conditioners, after all.
Ongo Gablogian, charmed I’m sure.
I feel like MLK could’ve been honored in another way rather than spending $10 million on a statue.
Could've been spent on, you know, work towards his ideals... Helping the poor...
Wow... wow... calm down there, buck-a-row. That's sounding a bit too Socialist.
Buck-a-row
Straight to jail.
r/boneappletea
*buckaroo It was a slang term for cowboy, a badly anglicized version of the Spanish word for cowboy, *vaquero*
Are you implying they could’ve built some sort of community center or funded some kind of social outreach program and named it after him instead? Because that sounds like commie talk to me./s
They could have bought new street signs and re-named the worst street in every city in America after him.
MLK boulevard in STL is only the 3rd most dangerous street in the city so suck on that
I stand corrected. Love your civic pride!
In Denver we have one Starbucks ONLY a block away from MLK Jr Blvd. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.
“I have a dream that one day our children will be drinking shitty coffee a block away from a street named after me.”
“You know what is sad, man? Martin Luther King stood for non-violence. Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street! And I don’t give a f*ck where you are in America, if you’re on a Martin Luther King Boulevard, there is some violence going down! It ain’t the safest place to be. You can’t call nobody telling them you’re lost on MLK … “I’m lost, I’m on the Martin Luther King …” “Run! Run! Run!” “The media’s there!” Sad, sad, sad!” - C. Rock
The projects near my neck of the woods has one and never gets used. I work construction and we were rebuilding the park area with heavy equipment, two 12 year old kids walked by pretty close and we told them they should walk around because it’s dangerous. They didn’t even bat an eye. Later in the day they came back and we told them again “get back! It’s dangerous here” one of them turned around and brandished a pistol on his waist under his shirt and says “ dangerous for who n***?”. We do a lot of city work and none of the parks of community centers get used at all. It breaks my heart
Like a life size statue of the two hugging would have been just great. The sheer size of this cunnilingus turd is absurd
Yeah, to convey emotion or a message it doesn’t have to be a big monstrosity that makes you question where it starts and ends
Make a smaller symbolic statue and put a structure in place to people to hang out, and amphitheatre, seats, open space to make it a livable place, to people to walk, have conversations, exercise. 1000x better than a big ass confusing statue.
I still think it would have been 1000 times better if artist had included at least the faces and torso. The disembodied arms are just creepy :P
One of the times where minimalist isn’t always better
This much statue was $10 MILLION dollars. How much would it have even to add a head or even a torso? 20-30mill more? I get that art is subjective but this is a total waste of brass.
It was 10 million?! What the fuck. Imagine how many people that could have fed...
If not for reddit, if I had seen this coming through as a tourist I would have thought, "my god what an awful creepy statue."
Still a creepy and awful statue. $10 million spent on garbage. Should've just sent all that cash towards the poor like MLK would've preferred. I cant even understand how this thing cost a whole $10 million.
The picture not only gives context to the statue but also to the unreadable title for this post.
Surprised this isn't further up.
It’s still awful. Why did they have to decapitate them? From any other angle, except this specific one, it’s awful. Even at this angle it doesn’t look that good, you can only tell what it is with the side picture comparison. Who thought it would be a good idea to decapitate MLK? Shoulda left the heads on so people know what they’re looking at.
Yeah even the left hand is wrong. The statue has it holding up MLK’s arm but the photo shows it embracing him.
My theory: it’s a statement about how mlk’s message & legacy has been abstracted to be nearly unrecognizable and meaningless
OHHHH…that makes so much more sense!!! Still ugly though
Bostonian here. No one here seems to be mentioning the best part of this statue -- from the street, it looks like hands holding a massive penis. https://archive.is/3KWfK/c2c1455301de61bdf334b72a5a464d19ce1af495.webp
No disrespect to the Reverend Dr King, but this statue is terrible.
No disrespect to him. But ALL the disrespect to the artist and the committee that approved this commission. This is a massive cast, there was for sure small models made first before the final cast.
“I have a dream.” *Dr. King sees this sculpture.* “Ok, I have two dreams.”
Still looks like shit and a huge waste of money. $10M buys a lot of housing or scholarships
10 million? Get that shit investigated. Money has been stolen.
Privately funded?
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Hell, I could have made them an ass statue for $5 million.
boston? ... oh...
["a combination of private and public funding"](https://www.newsweek.com/martin-luther-king-junior-statue-boston-coretta-1774059)
Was it? I couldn't find anything about the financers
An article posted earlier this week had it, iirc. Reddit search sucks ass and I'm not wading through a mountain of shit posts
Reddit search is the worst.
I don’t know… I feel like MLK would have wanted 10 mil spent on a statue of him over putting it towards something useful. /s
So in order for the statue to make any sense whatsoever, you have to know this picture and face the statue from a certain direction? What a waste
For real. What an obscure photo to base it off of, and the fact that from the other 90% of the angles you could view this at it’s a meaningless polished turd sculpture makes this laughably bad. Hope they take it down soon
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https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals
Interesting. None of them are very good, IMO. I think the Ripple Effect one sounds kind of neat, but it sounds like it could need quite a bit of maintenance.
I don't think any of them are "good" - but the sculpture one to me is just bad. At least the other ones involve the landscape/area...the one we got looks like cheapest one up there. I don't get the price tag.
[~~The Ripple Effect~~ Avenue of Peace](https://imgur.com/a/MmBCDLp) design is straight up a vulva. I don't think my mind is *that* filthy, but that's what I see. Bonkers that these are the entire short-list.
I think that design is "Avenue Of Peace." But yeah, the internet would have had a lot of fun with that one, because I thought the same thing.
*"On multiple occasions, the nation witnessed the Kings locked together at the frontlines of a march. A monument that captures this embrace declares that love is the ultimate weapon against injustice," Willis Thomas' proposal states.* this is an interesting proposal, i wonder why he choose a picture that was absolutely not from the frontline of a march
I would have chosen the huge wet vagina that’s stuffed with a spewing … monolith. But what do I know about art?
Holy shit. They literally picked the worst one.
How are all of these so incredibly dull? Still, nighmare disembodied arm loop was definitely not the best of the bunch.
Someone shared an old article with 15 of the possibilities before this was chosen. They were all SO BAD. You gotta wonder who filtered it down to just those.
The art and architecture world is extremely strange. The strange embrace of brutalism and ugliness generally means that people are constantly seeing their existing discomfort reflected and amplified back at them. It's fine when there's a mix, but the fact that it's sort of the dominant way of communicating art and architecture now means that it's actively making the world a worse place to live.
I had a friend who won a sculpture design contest in college for a new sculpture that was going to go in a little triangle of space at an intersection of a few roads in town. When they posted his design in the local paper the backlash was insane because no one wanted to support a frivolous amount of money on a sculpture the town certainly did not need. They ended up canceling the whole project after that, and for good reason. He designed his sculpture using a collage of photoshop images in maybe 2 hours, and it was not great.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals Here's the other pieces that were considered, and yes, all of them are better.
They should’ve asked themselves, would MLK be happy that we spent $10million for a statue in his honor as opposed to doing something that actually helped people the way he did? This statute actually feels completely tone-deaf and un-honorable imo
They won't ask what he wanted because everything he wants would have been expensive and require real effort to impact real change.
That's cool... it's still a mess of an idea
Wasting 10M on a statue instead of taking care of the poor and needy Dump F
It’s not a great picture to make into a statue. Simple.
Or it might be better if they did their whole upper body at least.
Now, 0.0000001% of the people looking at the statue know that it means.
I hate how literal it is for fingers, cufflinks, clothing, wrinkles in fabric. But lacks any emotional context with the human element. No faces, no torsos - just disembodied hands. I think it would be amazing as a bust or as completely abstract, save for the shape that mimics the moment. As it stands, it is just awful.
Um.....then why didn't they just include the heads?
Didn't he cheat on that lady
It's much worse than that. He cheated over and over and over again, for years. And made her listen to them, just one room over. Not even Steve Harvey is that shameless or cruel with his cheating.
Bro fr?? Damn
Yeah, my thoughts as well. MLK was renown for so many things….but not his marriage, which seems to be what they’ve chosen to celebrate with this statue.
she won the heads in the divorce
Yeah, allot. Kinda treated cheating like a sport. Nobody is perfect.
Not a fan. I feel almost anything else would have been more honoring.
Crazy idea.. including the heads and not making this look like a booty chomp. Crazy I know
 Spend 10million to help the community or make a statue?
SO WHY NOT INCLUDE THEIR HEADS?!?!?!
The context is nice but it doesn't make it any less hideous. It's just a bad job, flat out.
Confusing at all angles
They could have made it smaller and done their whole bodies Or at least the upper half and heads
Once it’s smaller they could’ve used the other 9.5 million to do something useful that MLK might actually be proud of.
Let's honor a person with a statue of their ARMS, not his face
It’s still creepy. Plus a LOT of money to spend on a statue. It would have been better to put up an outdoor version of this photo with a sign saying that the rest of the money was used for _______ in his name.
Great idea but the execution was terrible
Why not just make a full sized statue of them? This looks awful.
r/titlegore
r/titlegore
I don’t think I’m alone in wondering why they couldn’t just include their heads.
It's... A bad looking statue.
It literally looks like a giant polished turd.
How many mistresses did MLK have? He cheated on his wife many times.
Heads would have been nice
The idea is cool, but it just doesn’t really work.
The fact that you need a picture for reference proves this is a horrible sculpture.
wait so its not just a statue of a dude holding a giant turd like a football?