Richard Phillips’ Playboy Marfa sculpture, which provoked scandal and outrage in West Texas before it came to incite Instagrams and giggles outside the Dallas Contemporary in 2014, is gone in less than a week. The Contemporary announced today that the neon bunny and its accompanying muscle car will be removed the first week of April.
Which, as the Contemporary points out, gives you until Saturday to say your goodbyes.
This ends a three-year residency for a piece that, love it or hate it, had become somewhat emblematic of the Design District and the contemporary art museum to many Dallasites. Playboy Marfa was originally intended to remain on display for a year, a run that was extended “as it became a much-loved fixture of the Dallas Design District,” per the Contemporary. Certainly more loved than it was outside Marfa, where the Texas Department of Transportation demanded it get the heck away.
But before you go snap that final selfie with the logo for a magazine known primarily for its photo spreads of nude women, and to throw a little cold water on the Contemporary’s “much-loved” claim for the sculpture, here’s Peter Simek on Playboy Marfa in November 2013, a few months before the piece arrived in Dallas:
There is something frivolous and frustrating about Phillips’ piece. If you take a step back from the dry intellectual pat-a-cakes over the nature of the work of art, you see it as merely a trite, depressingly idiotic piece of consumer kitsch, a muscle car on a tilted pedestal facing a neon bunny. At best the piece is itself an example of art-parody, a self-effacing admittance of art’s own branded triviality, pandering consumer cool with a nihilistic swagger. It’s a conversation piece, but a dreadful and depressing work of art.
[d-embed][/d-embed]
