Is this how we bury the art of our problematic pasts - in a literal graveyard? Even then … it’s still there. Now it lives in the middle of a graveyard in Brooklyn. In each borough, they’ve always hated this thing. First stop was City Hall Park, next Kew Gardens in Queens. The statue has lived in a bunch of different places. PARKER: But even with a detailed explainer that the defeated female heads aren’t in fact as bad as you think … it’s still a lot upon first view. There’s an extensive plaque in front of the statue that tries to artistically explain the misogyny: Then moving the statue around ended up costing around $300,000. PARKER: Don’t worry, the statue only cost taxpayers like $100,000. But the idea that our tax dollars go to maintain this thing … And if you want to have sexist imagery in some museum, cool, they can pay for it. JAZMÍN: How is this different from Adam and Eve? And we still fuck with that.ĪVERY: Okay, but I think the difference is that this is a public statue maintained with public funds. Even in the 1920s, people were like, “I think this statue is a little sexist.”

PARKER: Civic Virtue was a statue commissioned in the 1920s for City Hall Park in Manhattan to illustrate “virtue conquering vice.” It just happened to be a nude man with a sword standing on the heads of a bevy of topless women. But the main reason for our trip was to see a statue that’s been on loan there for the past nine years called Civic Virtue. We ate rice pudding among the tombstones of Leonard Bernstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. PARKER: A few weeks ago, The Cut producers - Avery, Jazmín, and myself - went on a field trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. AVERY: Hey, the grave of Leonard Bernstein!

Woke up like this movie poster