Ah, Paris. City of love. Home of the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Cathédrale Notre-Dame and… a giant sculpture of a vagina. Yes, that’s right. There’s now a massive metal rendering of a vagina in the French capital.
The city’s newest tourist attraction, which was installed in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles last week, has divided opinion. Some people, particularly female academics, have praised the work, titled ‘Dirty Corner’.
However, many local media outlets are apparently scandalised – with radio station Europe 1 suggesting that the artist responsible for the sculpture ‘provokes a scandal’.
Tourists interviewed by the BBCseemed to be similarly unimpressed. Megan, visiting from the US, said: ‘When you think you’re coming to Versailles you’d expect like classic French, maybe a big statue of some Roman god but this just seems dirty, gross.’
Honestly, we can’t really understand what all of the fuss is about. After all, what is the Eiffel Tower if not a 984-foot, cast-iron phallus? It’s not like Paris doesn’t have recent form on this, either. Last year, US artist Paul McCarthy erected a ginormous, inflatable ‘Christmas tree’ sculpture in the Place Vendôme that was clearly meant to resemble a butt plug. A giant metal vagina is really the only thing the city was lacking.
After initially confirming that his instillation was, indeed, supposed to represent a massive vagina (specifically, ‘the vagina of the queen coming into power’) British sculptor Anish Kapoor was forced to backtrack. He claimed that he was misquoted in an earlier interview and coyly suggested that ‘a work has multiple interpretive possibilities’.
Versailles’ mayor, who is apparently not fond of large metal vaginas, tweeted that the artist had ‘slipped up’.
All of this ignores the fact that we have eyes, and that thing is clearly a vagina. A powerful, building-sized, wrought iron, motherloving queen’s vagina that deserves to be celebrated as the thing of beauty it is.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.