Ever since the “Fearless Girl” appeared on Wall Street two years ago, she’s been causing a lot of trouble. Now the financial services company that commissioned the statue is suing her creator.
State Street Global Advisors is accusing sculptor Kristen Visbal of breach of contract and trademark infringement. Visbal has sold at least three allegedly contraband statues according to the lawsuit, and the purchase price appears online at $6,650.
SSGA doesn’t want the original “Fearless Girl,” which has a permanent home across from the New York Stock Exchange, to diminish in value. Visbal doesn’t want to miss out on profiting from the statue’s international fame. Even before this financial tussle, the sculpture was always about publicity, not female empowerment.
When the “Fearless Girl” statue first appeared on International Women’s Day in March 2017, Arturo Di Modica was not happy. The sculptor behind “Charging Bull” said the piece erected across from his iconic statue reduced its meaning.
Di Modica created the bull after the 1987 market crash and quietly erected it, like the “Fearless Girl,” on the streets of New York City. The nod to a bull market also represents “freedom in the world, peace, strength, power and love,” according to the artist. By facing the bull as if it were a symbol of violence, something worth defiance, the “Fearless Girl” cheapened the bull’s message of ambition.
Sculptor Alexander Gardega agreed, calling the “Fearless Girl” statue “corporate nonsense,” and in May 2017 placed a statue of a dog peeing next to it. The inartful “Pissing Pug” was promptly removed.
“Fearless Girl” has since been relocated from Bowling Green Park, but the 50-inch statue continues to attract tourists and serve as a symbol of female empowerment.
Even now that it stands apart from the bull, there’s something else that belies its message.
Commissioning the work was a brilliant public relations move on the part of SSGA, but only until fall of 2017. The statue was meant to call attention to the gender pay gap and the lack of women in the financial sector, and SSGA even saw a resulting bump in profit. But just a few months after “Fearless Girl” appeared to symbolize the feminist values of SSGA, the company paid a $5 million settlement to black and female executives that a federal audit discovered were paid less for their work than their counterparts.
Symbolism is flimsy enough when it depends on rethinking the meaning of another piece of art. It’s totally empty when a work of art’s goals oppose its patron’s own actions. Maybe with the lawsuit, SSGA can get what it wanted all along: more cash.
