Bull

If you’re a sculptor, one tried and true method to make a work go public is to lend it to a city. Worked for the leaning-guy sculpture on the Wellington wharves and there’s bound to be others. The cheekiest example has got to be the way Arturo Di Modica plonked his now famous Charging Bull outside the New York Stock Exchange in 1989 without permission. Weighing in at over 3000 kilos, no one was about to shoo it away. The bull was eventually moved to a less prominent position in Lower Manhattan where it has been there for 17 years - the gift that keeps on giving. You’d think that having made such a public gesture, Di Modica would be relaxed about his gift bull being photographed and the images used for whatever purposes struck the photographer as worthwhile. Not so. When Random House used Charging Bull on the cover of Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers Di Modica saw red. The dispute is in progress. Di Modica has chased up copyright infringements before, challenging the common assumption that artworks in public places are fair game.