It took hardly seven minutes for some in the City of Chicago to get their knickers in a knot when a towering 26-foot version of the same figure by Johnson was installed July 15 in a plaza on North Michigan Avenue along the Magnificent Mile.
Critics there have lambasted it as “sexist,” “kitschy,” “creepy schlock from a fifth-rate sculptor,” “hideous” and “more New York than Chicago,” because the sculpture commemorates a moment in the movie that showed Marilyn astride a Manhattan subway grate, reveling in the fleeting whoosh of air from below during a nasty heat wave.
The trains in the Windy City are elevated, not subterranean.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported disturbing “photo-op behavior” that included men and women “licking Marilyn’s leg, gawking up her skirt and pointing at her giant panties as they leer and laugh.”
One blogger hoped that “Johnson’s next work for Chicago isn’t a re-creating of Sharon Stone’s pivotal moment in ‘Basic Instinct.’”
If Robert Frost could see Marilyn in Chicago now, he might want to rewrite his description of “the city of broad shoulders.”
Already a tourist favorite, Marilyn is scheduled to remain until spring.
If Chicago decides to remove her from view before then, Dayton might be interested.
“We’re not big on taking other cities’ rejects, but if Chicago wants to give us a 26-foot Marilyn Monroe for free, we will come and get her,” said Kristen Wicker, public relations and promotions manager for the Downtown Dayton Partnership.
“If she wasn’t the most popular one in ‘City Life,’ she was very close. People loved her here.”
“City Life,” which was funded by sponsors for each sculpture, was the brainchild of then Mayor Rhine McLin, who wanted to bring accessible public art to downtown.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2377 or tmorris@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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