Art! RBG-Cthulhu Abortion Statue Attacks Manhattan Courthouse

Matt Philbin | January 25, 2023
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Once again, the Big Apple is one-upping Bean Town. New York took one look at Boston’s weird MLK penis-arm thing and said,”Can we make a sculpture uglier and more bizarre than that? Quicker than you can say ‘Bucky Dent.’ Fuhgettaboutit!”

Gotham’s entry for Unholy Abomination of the Year appeared last week atop the State Appeals Court in Manhattan, according to the New York Times’s Dan Bilefsky. That roof had been the preserve of stone sculptures depicting important (male) world-historical lawgivers.Titled “NOW,” Bilefsky describes the addition as “a shimmering, golden eight-foot female sculpture, emerging from a pink lotus flower and wearing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature lace collar.”

Really. RBG. Except she’s naked and seems to have giant ram’s horns and some kind of Cthulu tentacles for arms, maybe. It’s the work of female sculptor Shahzia Sikander. Biefsky said Sikander “said the sculpture was part of an urgent and necessary cultural reckoning underway as New York, along with cities across the world, reconsiders traditional representations of power in public spaces and recasts civic structures to better reflect 21st-century social mores.”

So you know it’s got to be awful. 

“She is a fierce woman and a form of resistance in a space that has historically been dominated by patriarchal representation.” So she has nothing to do with justice, just petulance.  

You see, “‘With Ginsburg’s death and the reversal of Roe, there was a setback to women’s constitutional progress,’ she wrote in her artist’s statement.”

Ah hah! It’s about abortion. As a matter of fact, it seems calculated to induce spontaneous abortion in pregnant women, so if you’re one of the few New Yorker women interested in bringing your baby to term, don’t look up as you pass the State Appeals Court. 

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