Ben Schumin from Montgomery Village, Maryland, USA – Statue of Marilyn Forever via wikipedia
A group of Palm Springs residents who don't like a 26-foot statue of Marilyn Monroe that shows her skirt flying up got their lawsuit against the city reinstated on appeal. This gives them another chance to get the statue moved. In Forever Marilyn (2011), sculptor Seward Johnson shows Marilyn Monroe in a scene from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch in which the wind blows her white skirt up from a Manhattan sidewalk grate. Critics have called Forever Marilyn, which was put up near the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2021, sexist because it shows Marilyn Monroe's backside and underwear.
The Committee to Relocate Marilyn (or Crema), which is made up of influential Palm Springs residents like fashion designer Trina Turk and Modernist design collector Chris Menrad, filed a lawsuit against the City of Palm Springs. The original decision to throw out the lawsuit was overturned by California's 4th District Court of Appeals on Thursday, February 23. Crema's lawsuit said that city officials didn't have the right to stop cars from driving on the street in downtown Palm Springs where the statue of Monroe was put up three years ago. Members of the panel wrote that the California law that Palm Springs used lets cities temporarily close streets for special events. The panel did not agree with Palm Springs' claim that it was okay to close the street for three years because the Monroe sculpture was not permanent.
"These laws let cities close off parts of streets for short-term events like holiday parades, neighborhood street fairs, and block parties. These events usually last for a few hours, days, or even a few weeks. "They do not give cities the broad power to close public streets for years at a time so that statues or other semi-permanent works of art can be put in the middle of those streets," the panel's members wrote in the ruling. PS Resorts, a city-funded tourism agency, bought Forever Marilyn for $1 million in 2020. Their goal is to bring more people to Palm Springs, where Monroe was supposedly "discovered" by a talent agent. Even though some people were against it, the city council voted unanimously in 2021 to put the statue downtown near the Palm Springs Art Museum. "When you leave the museum, the first thing you'll see is a 26-foot Marilyn Monroe with her backside and underwear on display." "In 2020, the museum's director at the time, Louis Grachos, said this. "What does it say to our kids, our visitors, and our community when we put up a statue that makes women look like objects, is sexually charged, and is disrespectful?"
Seward Johnson's sculpture Forever Marilyn on display in front of the Palm Springs Museum of Art via wikipedia
Monroe died in 1962, but her image has stayed a big part of American pop culture for many years since then. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), a painting of her by the late Pop artist Andy Warhol, sold at Christie's New York for $195m (including fees) last year, breaking the record for the most expensive 20th-century work to sell at auction and the most valuable work by an American artist. Seward Johnson, who died in March 2020, made large sculptures that have often confused and upset people. When it was put up in central Chicago in 2017, a huge sculpture of Abraham Lincoln next to a generic modern white man made a lot of people scratch their heads. In 1992, Johnson opened an art museum in Hamilton, New Jersey, called Grounds for Sculpture. It has permanent displays of his weird statues, an outdoor sculpture park, and temporary shows by modern artists.
Jean Dubreil