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Course: The British Museum > Unit 7
Lesson 1: Contemporary Sculptors at the British MuseumMarc Quinn's Siren at the British Museum (Kate Moss)
Marc Quinn remembers his visit to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. He shares his delight in coming back to exhibit a work inspired by that experience and the surrounding ancient Greek sculpture. Curator Peter Higgs draws parallels with ideal female nudes created in 4th-century BC Greece.
Quinn’s fascination with our attitudes towards female beauty has repeatedly led him to ancient Greek art. His new sculpture, Siren, is of the model Kate Moss and is made entirely out of gold. Quinn presents Moss as a modern-day Aphrodite reminding us that Moss's likeness has become as iconic as the goddesses of the ancient world. © Trustees of the British Museum. Created by British Museum.
Quinn’s fascination with our attitudes towards female beauty has repeatedly led him to ancient Greek art. His new sculpture, Siren, is of the model Kate Moss and is made entirely out of gold. Quinn presents Moss as a modern-day Aphrodite reminding us that Moss's likeness has become as iconic as the goddesses of the ancient world. © Trustees of the British Museum. Created by British Museum.
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Is it just me or is there a discrepancy between what the movie says and the work of art itself? Wouldn't a cobra-like yoga pose have been more appropriate (in light of his comment @1:18"and to me it's like a sphinx") instead of this "knot" (where the female figure is immobilized and presented to the (male?) viewer? I find her contorted body not in any way resembling that of the Greek nudes shown, the statue is due to the (material and) composition more like an (alien?) object not 'the ideal female nude'. (To be honest, I find it a rather uncomfortable piece to look at.)(7 votes)
I absolutely agree, I find this a very disconcerting piece of art. The voice-over says Venus would have been insulted if she had been presented in this way. I am not sure why, then, this person thinks this is a good way to display a 'modern goddess'.(1 vote)
Do we know what Kate Moss's reaction to this statue is?(3 votes)- Does anyone else have a problem with buffering in the video?(1 vote)
YES! I wonder if it is the video itself. Maybe, Maybe not. I have no idea(1 vote)
1:18Video transcript
It's very interesting to show this sculpture
in the British Museum because it's where I remember seeing the mask of Tutankhamun in 1970s and that was one of the most important images
for me and to kind of come back with the work inspired
by that is great As far as I know it's the largest gold statue
certainly since Antiquity and probably ever It's fifty kilos which doesn't sound very much but in fact in a cast statue that is a lot all those Egyptian statues are hammered sheet which is a different kind of thing to being
cast This sculpture isn't a sculpture of Kate Moss the person it's a sculpture of Kate Moss the cultural hallucination and to me it's like a sphinx To put her in this yoga pose was a bit like
a knot I don't really know what it means but it means something that collectively we've
all decided it means The Greeks of course were famous for their
male nudes and were only just getting to grips with the
female nude in the fourth century BC when these statues from the Nereid Monument
were made but there were some famous perhaps courtesans who modelled for sculptors and they were really making not portraits of these models but using them as the ideal female nude Venus, showing her nude would have been one thing showing her in a kind of contorted pose may have slightly offended her and if you offended the gods you were in big
trouble What's wonderful about bringing contemporary
sculptures into galleries with ancient art is that people look very closely at contemporary sculptures and they pick out different details on them and with ancient sculptures, particularly
from architecture they perhaps see it as a whole Hoping now that people will look at the figure
of Kate Moss and then walk around the gallery and start
getting perhaps a little bit more intimate with our sculptures as intimate as they can before they get shouted
at by the guards The fact that the sculptures in the British
Museum shows that we have gods and goddesses just like Romans,
Greeks and Syrians but perhaps sometimes we're not aware of the
position that they fit in our psyche I think that you get context and context for
our own belief systems you walk in here you see the Venus in front
of it you see all the amazing myriad sculptures
around it and you realise that in a way people change
but they're always the same