Here is the bad public artwork du jour: a statue of Tina Turner in her hometown Brownsville, Tennessee, that measures 10 feet tall and garishly distorts the face of the late pop star it supposedly depicts.
The statue by Fred Ajanogha was unveiled on Saturday and has already generated no small amount of outrage online. “Words fail. Great art does that, leaves you speechless So does an abomination like this,” reads one tweet with more than 5,000 likes.
Perhaps expectedly, the statue has been pilloried by a significant quotient of right-wing commentators who have regularly obsessed over who deserves to be represented in public art. One is Matt Walsh, who said this week that the Turner statue looked like “Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons but retarded” and “a young Sean Astin dressed in drag with smaller breasts.”
But the statue has drawn condemnation from other corners of the internet as well. “I know that ain’t supposed to be no TINA TURNER!!” wrote the comedian Kevin Fredericks on X, adding, in an accompanying video, “What’s art got to do with it? She deserves better.”
Fredericks pointed to an array of much-debated monuments and statues, including Hank Willis Thomas’s memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, a terrifying sculpture of Lucille Ball, and a bust of Cristiano Ronaldo looking, well, pretty busted. Fredericks is right, at least, to compare the Turner statue to the Ball and Ronaldo works, because this one looks nothing like her, just as those look nothing like the actress and sports star they respectively claim to represent.
Photos of the statue taken by the Associated Press (AP) suggest that this sculpture has the bizarre proportions of a Mannerist painting. Her legs are unnaturally long, and a toothy smile is plastered across her face, running unnaturally from eye to eye.
Many have scrutinized the sculpture’s hair, a big pile of locks that balloons into the air and falls across one shoulder. The AP reported that Ajanogha was attempting to recreate Turner’s signature hairstyle, which he wanted to render as the “mane of a lion,” as he put it. But in the resultant work, it looks less like a lion’s mane than a heap of plastic.
Compare the Brownsville statue to a Turner sculpture in Albania—no masterpiece either, but a work that’s at least more organic than the one in Tennessee. Note the way Turner’s strands fly in all directions in the Albania sculpture, a naturalistic flourish that lends that statue some life. The Brownsville one, by contrast, appears static and inhuman.
One thing is for certain, however: the Brownsville statue is better than the AI versions of it that can be found on social media, which look even less lifeless than the real thing.
