Yes, But Is It Art?

The artist who made the Britney Spears statue is getting a lot of hate mail from the pro-choice and anti-choice activists over the depiction. But let's look at it as a piece of art. I'm only judging it from the photograph and I'm not a credentialed art critic, but the statue is both tacky and unintentionally comical.

But let's hear from the artist:

"This is a new take on pro-life. Pro-lifers normally promote bloody images of abortion. This is the image of birth," Daniel Edwards said of his work, to be unveiled at a Brooklyn gallery in April, months after Edwards' sculpture of Ted Williams severed head stirred up an artistic storm.
[...]

"I admire her. This is an idealized figure," he said. "Everyone is coming at me with anger and venom, but I depicted her as she has depicted herself - seductively. Suddenly, she's a mom."

His aim, said the son of a mother who gave birth to him when she was 17, was to stir up debate about a difficult topic that "is greater than the issues presented by either pro-life and pro-choice advocates."

Actually, there was no suddenly about it. Spears was pregnant for the usual amount of time.It doesn't strike me as an image of birth, because from what I know of the procedure, women don't give birth in the doggie-style position (36 hours in that pose would put a hell of a strain on the back). As for the "idealized...seductive" aspects, the choice of white clay allows the statue to echo images of Greek classic sculpture (a faint echo, but it is there, and since the Greeks sculpted idealized figures...well...okay); but the bearskin rug was a cliche when Burt Reynolds posed nude on one in the 1970s. No one has thought of the bearskin rug as a genuinely sexy piece of decor for several decades (with the possible exception of Ted Nugent, but let's leave his proclivities out of this). The statue seems like something a pregnancy fetishist would have in his home, if he lacked imagination.

Since the image doesn't read like genuine sexuality and doesn't read like a woman in birth (crowning head notwithstanding), what is it? I'm tempted to go with "some kind of joke"--a humorous riff perhaps on Britney Spears's hackneyed takes on sexuality and pregnancy, a satirical broadside at the various ways we objectify and fetishize the female form. I'd like to think that was what was going through the artist's head, but I don't feel that generous today. It's kitsch: motherhood kitsch, sexual kitsch. It simultaneously celebrates the two things that dull, unthinking men think that women are good for. It's crude, tasteless, chauvinistic, and has nothing of value to contribute to the debate the artist supposedly wishes to incite.

What is left is art, there's no question of that.