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Paying Art's Dues

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The Daily Pic: The Bruce High Quality Foundation gets crafty with labor.

The New Colossus by the Bruce High Quality Foundation

(Photo by Lucy Hogg)

In the great Lever House courtyard on Park Avenue, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has installed a piece called “The New Colossus”, a life-size bronze copy of the inflatable rat that unions park wherever scab labor’s being used. The exhibition statement says that the art collective has “undermined the political content by solidifying a plastic animal in bronze and by declaring it to be fine art”, but I can’t buy that reading. I think the piece works, and works well, in a much more traditional mold: As a classic celebration, in bronze, of the thing it depicts – this time the labor rat rather than Marcus Aurelius. Of course, there’s irony in using an upper-class medium for a working-class subject, but I see the combination as portending a utopian, genuinely democratic future where the working stiff rules.  

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Blake Gopnik is a contributing critic to Newsweek and The Daily Beast and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post and before that was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from Facebook to gastronomy.

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