Bruce High Quality Foundation Rat at Lever House is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

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.

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.