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The trouble with statues Who can make a great one?
The Guardian
|June 28, 2025
The trouble with statues is that nobody knows how to make a great one any more.
The trouble with statues is that nobody knows how to make a great one any more. Realistic figurative sculpture has long since been relegated by the art world to the category of the terminally uncool so the work often goes to talentless hacks. Yet the demand for figures of the famous is as insatiable as ever. England expects. A statue of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip is planned for St James's Park in central London and Andy Murray's is about to be unveiled at Wimbledon. These are just the latest controversy-generating bronze or stone imitations of life.
Sneering at such figures has become a great sport of our time - look at those outsize hands/tiny feet/that unrecognisable, ghastly face! Perhaps it's even because we enjoy the mockery and rage bad art inspires that the appetite for public sculpture is so relentless.
Who can forget the polychrome, dancing Michael Jackson at Fulham FC or the hideous statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, that her sons unveiled at Kensington Palace? Fun to criticise, not so much fun to have to look at in a public place for years on end. Or centuries.
This story is from the June 28, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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