Wall Street’s three-and-half-ton bronze Charging Bull has stood frozen in mid-charge, to meet oncoming traffic just above the bottom of Broadway for nearly 30 years. It’s a symbol, the artist Arturo Di Modica would say, of achievement and optimism—of the American capitalist’s unbridled bravado. Until last month, that is, when the big bull lost his swagger to a little girl. And now Di Modica’s ready to sue for that swagger’s rightful restitution.
On March 8, International Women’s Day—and, this year, the “Day Without a Woman”—the Boston-based mutual fund management firm State Street Global Advisors unveiled its politically fashionable addendum to Di Modica’s bull: staring down the beast, a 50-inch-tall bronze schoolgirl with her hands on her hips. (You’ve probably seen her on social media.) Fearless Girl was to be a temporary installation, intended to promote State Street’s year-old index fund for gender diverse companies, and to bring a plucky ponytail to the Bowling Green park in the name of girl power—but just for that one month. The girl’s stalwart stance against Di Modica’s, apparently, male chauvinist bull so delighted celebrities, Clintons, and even the occasional ordinary person that her stay on the bull’s traffic island was stretched to a full year.
State Street, Di Modica’s lawyers like to point out, has its marketing team at McCann to thank. A plaque only recently removed from the foot of Fearless Girl plugged the index fund, which is cutely called “SHE” on the stock exchange. Disingenuous commercial motivations notwithstanding, the girl—much like a miniaturized and inert Elizabeth Warren—casts the bull of Wall Street as a cruel Goliath. And as such she amounts to a shameful corruption, Di Modica claims, of his original artwork.
With a terribilità probably unique to Italian sculptors, he clutched at his chest and mourned what had become of his bull, telling reporters at a press conference this week, “I am an artist!” And, “I am not ‘poor Arturo,'” he added—remembering what sculptor Kristen Visbal, the artist State Street commissioned for Fearless Girl, had told the New York Post weeks before.
She’d said she felt sorry for him, and admired his work, but that it was high time to defer to womankind. “The world changes,” she’d said, “and we are now running with this bull”—a confusing sentiment, at least directionally, when the girl is positioned against rather than with the bull. Mayor Bill de Blasio inscrutably smarmed along these same lines, via Twitter Wednesday morning. “Men who don’t like women taking up space are exactly why we need the Fearless Girl,” de Blasio believes.
Of de Blasio’s tweet, one of Di Modica’s lawyers, Steven Hyman, told me, “If you can understand that tweet, you’re better than I. But it doesn’t appear he rallied to Arturo’s side.” The mayor, along with State Street and McCann, have received letters from lawyers Norman Siegel and Hyman outlining violations of their client’s legal and statutory rights under federal trademark and copyright laws.
They request “that the ‘Fearless Girl’ statue be removed and placed somewhere else and that damages be awarded to Mr. Di Modica”—she might be removed, for instance, to face down the door of the Stock Exchange. This would be a particularly poetic placement for the girl, even a gesture of respect to the bronze that inspired it, because it was out in front of the New York Stock Exchange that Di Modica first left his now iconic homage to the charging city.
“The issue of gender equality on Wall Street is not a new one; it must be dealt with,” Hyman allowed—but overtaking Charging Bull, making it a new work without the artist’s consent, is not the way. The girl makes the bull an aggressor: “That’s why she’s ‘fearless.’ It’s a charging bull coming at her. It’s their message. That’s not his message, and they’re entitled to their message in some way but not to use his art as part of their art.”
Charging Bull had been the now 76-year-old Sicilian sculptor Di Modica’s initially unwanted gift to New York. It was guerilla art—left out under the NYSE Christmas tree, one December night in 1989, only to be hauled away the following morning. The bull eventually won its iconic status after the city found a home for him at the nearby Bowling Green traffic island.
Bankers and traders who passed by it every day would get a spiritual boost, for the good of us all, Di Modica believed. If the 1987 crash and its global reverberations proved how that decade’s overvalued market had knitted the world together, everyone’s prosperity depended on these men and, yes, more than a few women, so building them a great big bronze bull was the least he could do. For two years he worked on the bull at his SoHo studio, as a symbol of “the hope of the American people for the future.” Now, it’s his great masterpiece and his legacy, his trademark already defended against commercial infringement.
And Di Modica’s best known public work, today, just looks embarrassed. Is the bull really charging at the girl, or is he turning slightly away from her, cowed by her determination? The installation’s success lies in its seeming to take the original work’s entire premise to task—and the fact that the Fearless Girl stands to meet a legal challenge as result of its subversion only heightens the winning effect.
Di Modica probably put it best: “The girl is right in front doing this, ‘Now I’m here, what are you going to do?'” Well, his lawyers sent letters to State Street, McCann, and Mayor de Blasio, explaining their client’s complaints on Tuesday. As of Thursday, they hadn’t heard back. “The inescapable implication is that the Charging Bull is the source of that fear and power and a force against doing what’s right. Plainly, the presence of the statue of the young girl has tarnished and modified the changing bull: ‘intended as a symbol of strength by the artist, the bull takes on a menacing air in relation to the girl,'” quoting from a sharp brand-focused analysis of the “Fearless Girl,” who is, after all, essentially an ad campaign.
Those who want the little girl to stay put, Mayor de Blasio among them, will argue it’s about time the bull were embarrassed! He’s not just a celebration of unfashionable prosperity but a symbol, as are most things in life if you look at them just so, of male dominance and oppression. The stand-off between State Street Capital’s little girl and Di Modica’s bull then becomes also a stand-off between the original context and intent of a public artwork and the political currency it falls into over time.
There’s also, in the battle of the the bull and the girl, a stand-off between a beloved gift to the city, two years’ private work on Di Modica’s part all to honor the wild spirit of capital with what he Yuletide symbol of the ”strength and power of the American people” on the one hand—and a corporate commission, intended to scold a sexist status quo, on the other. The corporate commission (that is, Fearless Girl) seems the more beloved now, if Twitter, Instagram, the comment section on this Times story, and the musings of the mayor are any indication. Which is wonderful news, really, for State Street: a highly effective PR campaign that’s overshadowed the only other commonly known or widely remembered tidbit about them, the dreaded pink high-heel pump left on the desk of whomever had gone home to his wife or girlfriend rather than go out drinking with his bros at the firm. Even the Fearless Girl’s amicable removal, under threat of litigation from a soulful Sicilian who celebrates American capitalism, will probably add to their public image as an enlightened firm.
Times change, as the second sculptor Visbal suggested, and nothing ever goes on meaning what it first did—the bull, for instance, has become subject to a certain traditional tribute over the years in which tourists will pay special attention to its most masculine asset. This ritual, it’s fairly safe to say, Di Modica did not intend. But such is the life of a public work, his opponents might argue: Being fearsome and aggressively masculine to begin with, the bull already stood for male dominance, whatever the artist’s intent, long before Fearless Girl came along. If the battle of the bull and the girl teaches us anything, it should be the timeless value of copyright protections.
