They’ve got a three-year itch.
A gaggle of Palm Springs residents are fighting to remove a towering statue of Marilyn Monroe in certainly one of her most iconic poses, arguing that the work is a sexist eyesore that blocks traffic.
On Feb. 23, The Art Newspaper reported, California’s 4th District Court of Appeals overturned a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by the Committee to Relocate Marilyn (Crema), which is battling to remove Seward Johnson’s 2011 sculpture “Without end Marilyn” from its current place outside the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Standing 25 feet tall, “Without end Marilyn” shows the blonde bombshell in a famous scene from the 1955 comedy “The Seven-Yr Itch” through which her white dress is blown up by a subway grate, revealing her backside.
Originally displayed in Chicago, the work was purchased for $1 million by the tourism agency PS Resorts in 2020. Later that yr, town council unanimously voted to position it outside the Palm Springs Art Museum for up to 3 years.
Within the lawsuit against town, the elite members of Crema – including designer Trina Turk – argue that officials didn’t have the best to stop traffic on the road where the statue now sits.
The California laws that allow cities to enact temporary road closures, the group protested, “don’t vest cities with the expansive power to shut public streets — for years on end — so statues or other semi-permanent artistic endeavors could also be erected in the midst of those streets.”
Even before the lawsuit, nonetheless, “Without end Marilyn” was the topic of fierce local criticism. When the statue was first purchased, Louis Grachos, then the manager director of the Palm Spring, argued that the work objectified the late star, who died in 1962.
“You come out of the museum and the very first thing you’re going to see is a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe together with her entire backside and underwear exposed,” he reportedly said.
“We serve over 100,000 school-age children that come to our museum each yr. What message does that send to our young people, our visitors and community to present a statue that objectifies women, is sexually charged and disrespectful?”
Around the identical time, Los Angeles artist Nathan Coutts commented on a change.org petition against the installation, calling Johnson’s work “derivative, tone-deaf, [and] in poor taste.”
“If it should be displayed, move it down the road with the concrete dinosaurs near Cabazon, where it could actually exist because the campy roadside attraction it excels at being.”
Protestors also showed up on the official installation, wielding signs that read “It’s not nostalgia, it’s misogyny.”
“Without end Marilyn” is removed from the one artwork of Monroe – born Norma Jean Mortenson – to make headlines in recent months: Last spring, Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” sold for $195 million at Christie’s, setting the record for the most costly work of American art ever sold.
“The painting transcends the genre of portraiture, superseding Twentieth-century art and culture. Standing alongside Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus,’ Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’ is certainly one of the best paintings of all time,” Alex Rotter, chairman of Twentieth and twenty first Century Art on the auction house, said of the piece on the time.
