Bare Breasts On Statue Offend Some at Arboretum

[cthulu2016]

29. I would say that an artwork that makes a lot of visitors feel

like they should be someplace else is not desirable for a public space.

If this were just an anatomically correct sculpture of a standing female nude I would feel differently, but it's a coarsely eroticized work.

Public art isn't a matter of good and evil. It's about the general attitudes of people who will be using the public space.

Some weirdo will get the vapors over anything, so the question is whether something is uncomfortable for a lot of folks who are not professional outrage peddlers, and in my experience with art and public attitudes I see this as over the line.

The comfort line, not a line of morality.

(In Chacago they are erecting a 60-foot tall statue of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up, and for a long time it was just hers legs. Incredibly non-prudish female friends in Chicago said it disturbed them and made them feel uncomfortable walking to work... the dismemebered female form seems to make a lot of women feel ill-at-ease.)

I would predict that the majority of visitors attending this park with children would have a negative reaction, not just a few puritans.

And perhaps they are wrong to do so... but it's a park. Should someone need avant-garde attitudes to be comfortable in a park, or is a park aimed at a broad swath of the public?

If the work was in a museum that would be different because a museum has different expectations than the outdoors. And a private gallery has different expepctations than a public museum... and so on.

Again, that's not a moral rule. It's a general public attitude guideline.

I have been involved on the other side of some public art controversies. I think public art is usually way too cautious and innocuous.