For those who remember the Fearless Girl statue, you might remember that not everybody considered it a legitimate or honest tribute to girl power or feminism. There was a piece at Hyperallergic we linked to a while back.
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
Last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by artist Kristen Visbal and installed by financial firm State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.”
Having witnessed all of this firsthand, I do not think it’s a stretch to say “Fearless Girl” represents basically everything that’s wrong with our society.
Here is the narrative being spun about “Fearless Girl”: An advertising firm and a financial services firm got together to drop a “remarkable,” “guerrilla” sculpture of a young girl in front of Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” in the middle of the night. The girl is part of a campaign to encourage companies to increase the number of women on their boards. The girl “is a remarkable evolution for Wall Street.” The girl might even represent “the turning point of gender equality in corporate America.” The girl “celebrates all the people who resisted by staying in place.” If installed permanently, the girl would be “a constant source of strength” for women who work in the vicinity.
That’s fuzzy and inspiring and stuff, but here is the truth about “Fearless Girl”: It features a branded plaque at its base. The companies that installed it had a permit. They are advertising firm McCann New York — whose leadership team has only three women among 11 people, or 27% women — and asset manager SSGA — whose leadership team has five women among 28 people, or 18% women. SSGA is a division of State Street, which has a board of directors that includes only 27% women. SSGA is also, according to Wikipedia, the world’s third-largest asset manager, managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets in 2014. And, like any good capitalist behemoth, it has some shady dealings in its history — like the time the SEC charged State Street with misleading investors during the subprime mortgage crisis. Or the class-action lawsuit brought against it for mismanaging retirement funds. Or the over $64 million that the company agreed to pay in January to settle fraud charges brought by the government, as Nick Pinto pointed out in the Village Voice.
But don’t worry about those cheating Wall Streeters who can’t be bothered to take care with people’s investments and lives — “Fearless Girl” will stop them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”!
I spent International Women’s Day on strike and not looking very much at the news or my phone. When I heard about the stunt, sometime in the evening, I felt offense begin to bore a hole deep in my core. Could there possibly be anything more patronizing than two massive, male-dominated capitalist companies installing a branded statue of the most conceivably non-threatening version of womankind in supposed honor of a day devoted to women’s equality that was founded by the Socialist Party?
No, alas, I think there could not.
As I've written before, a few times, there's been nothing quite like the last year and a half to clarify the difference between liberals and leftists in Anglo-American contexts quite like the election of Trump.
So for those authors who have, from the left, condemned the Fearless Girl statue as nothing more than pandering, self-serving fake corporate feminism, some new evidence for such a conclusion has emerged.
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/sep/15/news/la-heb-internet-diseases-20100915
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
Last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by artist Kristen Visbal and installed by financial firm State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.”
Having witnessed all of this firsthand, I do not think it’s a stretch to say “Fearless Girl” represents basically everything that’s wrong with our society.
Here is the narrative being spun about “Fearless Girl”: An advertising firm and a financial services firm got together to drop a “remarkable,” “guerrilla” sculpture of a young girl in front of Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” in the middle of the night. The girl is part of a campaign to encourage companies to increase the number of women on their boards. The girl “is a remarkable evolution for Wall Street.” The girl might even represent “the turning point of gender equality in corporate America.” The girl “celebrates all the people who resisted by staying in place.” If installed permanently, the girl would be “a constant source of strength” for women who work in the vicinity.
That’s fuzzy and inspiring and stuff, but here is the truth about “Fearless Girl”: It features a branded plaque at its base. The companies that installed it had a permit. They are advertising firm McCann New York — whose leadership team has only three women among 11 people, or 27% women — and asset manager SSGA — whose leadership team has five women among 28 people, or 18% women. SSGA is a division of State Street, which has a board of directors that includes only 27% women. SSGA is also, according to Wikipedia, the world’s third-largest asset manager, managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets in 2014. And, like any good capitalist behemoth, it has some shady dealings in its history — like the time the SEC charged State Street with misleading investors during the subprime mortgage crisis. Or the class-action lawsuit brought against it for mismanaging retirement funds. Or the over $64 million that the company agreed to pay in January to settle fraud charges brought by the government, as Nick Pinto pointed out in the Village Voice.
But don’t worry about those cheating Wall Streeters who can’t be bothered to take care with people’s investments and lives — “Fearless Girl” will stop them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”!
I spent International Women’s Day on strike and not looking very much at the news or my phone. When I heard about the stunt, sometime in the evening, I felt offense begin to bore a hole deep in my core. Could there possibly be anything more patronizing than two massive, male-dominated capitalist companies installing a branded statue of the most conceivably non-threatening version of womankind in supposed honor of a day devoted to women’s equality that was founded by the Socialist Party?
No, alas, I think there could not.
As I've written before, a few times, there's been nothing quite like the last year and a half to clarify the difference between liberals and leftists in Anglo-American contexts quite like the election of Trump.
So for those authors who have, from the left, condemned the Fearless Girl statue as nothing more than pandering, self-serving fake corporate feminism, some new evidence for such a conclusion has emerged.
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/sep/15/news/la-heb-internet-diseases-20100915
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fearless-girl-settles-gender-discrimination-suit-1110587
Actually paying women employees better to begin with rather than commissioning, funding or in any way installing and promoting the Fearless Girl statute would have been better.
\
Actually paying women employees better to begin with rather than commissioning, funding or in any way installing and promoting the Fearless Girl statute would have been better.
\
2 comments:
Thomas Piketty argued that the economic disparity of the West is eerily parallel to that of France on the eve of the French Rev. I'm not sure whether that actually means anything, but it does remind me of a great film "That Night in Varennes", a French film. The plot follows a group of liberal, and some libertine, aristocrats. The punchline was that the Revolution ended an era of frivolity and joy, an age of masks and balls, where reality, which was ugly, was beautified through fashion, style, and a dance of images. In contrast, the Revolution, symbolized by a hot-headed, misogynistic, proto-Jacobin and the dead-eyed crowd of anti-royal peasants, ushered in a wave of violence with its solemnity, zeal, and idealism.
The statue reminds me of the liberal nobility who loved to dabble in liberal pet causes. Marie-Antoinette loved Rousseau and had a little farm to dress up as a shepherdess, the Duc D'Orlais had his own seedy pleasure alley, and, well, there's the American Revolution. Liberal activism is fun and can feel good, it's not really important if anything happens.
cal
PS. What do you think of Mbird's recent article citation about Spiderman and Luther? Good comparison or fishing?
Rod Dreher's begun to regularly refer to Weimar America. That seems faintly paranoid but a comparison to pre-revolutionary France might be a parallel from a different time that could be comparably apt or ... maybe downbeat. But I am generally sympathetic to downbeat these days. :)
I'm on the fence about the Spiderman/Luther comparison. While I do think Parker is defined by guilt over the death that was caused by his hubris I think I'm more persuaded by the Conrad comparison than the Luther comparison in some ways, of being haunted by the realization that terrible things have transpired that you're part of and can't extricate yourself from.
I DID see Blade Runner 2049 and liked it. In some ways I liked it better than the original but I'm ambivalent about the idea that Deckard loved Rachel (my friend James showed the international cut a month ago), because while I get that Deckard is presented as having loved Rachel he forced himself on her in the original film. The more I've read about the old film the more I"ve learned that that wasn't how the scenes were scripted and Ridley Scott made a decision to have Deckard force himself on Rachel because that directed better. That seems a shame to me, but then the older I get the more I thinkScott is a hack who needs to be kept away from making crucial decisions about plots. Had the director of Arrival not directed 2049 I honestly don't think I would have bothered watching the Blade Runner sequel.
I'm gonna try to hunker down and finally finish the Justice League essays between now and the release of the film. I've got some musical stuff scheduled and I also promised some friends I'd show them the glorious fifth season of Samurai Jack so I might not be posting as much this month with so many things coming up.
Post a Comment