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Statement Art

In 2012 I had the chance to visit Europe with my friend Graham. We spent a couple weeks going to a few different areas - one of which was Milan, my future home. We planned to go there for a soccer game, see the famous Duomo, and use the train station as a launch-pad for the Lake Como area.

In our time in the city we wanted to browse a little bit of the local art scene but unfortunately couldn't get a time to see the Last Supper (Jenna and I were able to see it during our time there. It was awesome). We walked the city streets though, and not surprisingly there was a lot to see.

Statues abound in Italy - guys you've never heard of and extremely famous people alike. There are buildings older than the USA, there are fascinating shops, and there are restaurants that offer burgers named after Native American tribes in a vaguely offensive atmosphere.

So one day we were walking from our hotel to a random corner of the city. We started by passing a shop that offered pens - the writing utensils - for upwards of $400 apiece. This is not a joke. In the photo below you'll see price tags upwards of 400 Euros. The most expensive I remember was well over $1,000.


Confused, we kept walking. We headed through the business district partially by accident. This is a part of the city that wasn't actually on the way to where we were going (Duomo, probably) and we suddenly found ourselves in an odd little plaza called Piazza Affari.

The building that makes up the primary facade of Piazza Affari is the headquarters of the Italian stock exchange. That building is called the Palazzo Mezzanotte - literally The Midnight Palace. Nothing suspicious or discomforting about the financial center of the country being called "The Midnight Palace," right?

Anyway, this plaza had a special feature. A giant statue still sits in the center of it - a statue that has sat there since 2010, not long after the global financial crisis which hit Italy extremely hard. The statue is on a 15 foot high pedestal and the whole thing totals 36 feet tall. It sends a message to the financial powers whose offices look out into the plaza. What is that message, you might ask?

Well, here's the statue.


Now...what could the artist, Maurizio Cattelan, mean by this?

Curiously, he's actually stayed quiet about the sculpture. Atlas Obscura has a little bit of information about it, but Cattelan hasn't really spoken about the sculpture.

If you're in the neighborhood, it's probably worth checking out.

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