Top 5 Most Controversial Statues


5. Any Weeping Statue, Ever

It seems that claims of sacred ‘weeping’ statues have increased of late: there have been eight cases in the last decade. Even those that aren’t proven as hoaxes meet skepticism from both sides of the secular / ecclesiastical divide. The church has been known to expel people who make claims about supernaturally crying statues, and science has repeatedly attempted to attribute the phenomenon to microscopic cracks and plain old fashioned hoaxes. It usually takes the church itself to step in to speak sense to the influx of pilgrims, but certainly, people want to believe.
4. “Streams”


You could probably make a pretty good ‘top ten’ of controversial statues by just listing David Cerny’s back catalog. These contoured gentlemen urinating into a Czech-shaped pond outside the Franz Kafka museum seem like a rather obvious joke, but they’re actually an ingenious interactive exhibit: their waists swivel and they can apparently write anything you text to them. Like Ghostbusters, you probably wouldn’t want to cross the streams.
3. “Iraq War Memorial

This fake tomb, depicting the third in line to the British throne as a soldier killed in action was attempting to catch anti-war sentiment in the UK over interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but mostly caught a lot of hot air from commentators who didn’t quite believe the artistic intent of its sculptor. It was manipulative and a little too heavy handed for its own good, and thanks to the installation being inside a hotel, it was quickly forgotten.
2. “Miss Kitty”

‘Miss Kitty’ is a statue by Paolo Schmidlin that features none other than the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI wearing stockings and a blonde wig and standing provocatively. Not surprisingly, the Catholic church took offense to the statue and forced an entire exhibition around it to be removed to Florence from Milan.
1. “We Are The Champions”

Bottom, backside, bum, keister, posterior, buttocks, fanny, tooshie, ass, arse. This David Cerny statue presents itself at the FUTURA gallery, Prague in Cerny’s native Czech Republic. If you climb the ladder and stick your head where the sun doesn’t shine, you’ll be treated to a musical loop of Queen’s We Are The Champions and a short film of two politicians ‘feeding each other slop’.
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