The Bull of Wall Street
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I probably mentioned this before, but search engines broadcast from Manhattan. Our offices are in the financial district right by Wall Street. Walking outside of the entrance of our building, the first thing you see is just this very tiny plaza. Like plaza is almost too grand a word for it. It's just a small triangle of concrete and there's cobblestones. It sits just on top of this tiny little piece of park. There's some fences, there's a fountain, there's not much.

One more, one more. But in the center of the concrete triangle, there's this sculpture. It's a sculpture of a gigantic bronze bull. It's planted snout low, like it's about to charge somebody. This public sculpture, everyone I know calls it the Wall Street Bull, although technically it's called the Charging Bull.

And every day, including today where it's very cold outside, two enormous lines of tourists wait to take their photos with this bull. There's a short line by the horns and a much, much larger line here by the balls. I thought about these balls for a few months, and the bull they belong to as well. In April, when I started working in this office regularly, I'd go outside and take a smoke break without the cigarette.

I just stand there and stare at the bowl while I cleared my mind. The bowl is not a beautiful piece of art. It's not transcendent. I'm not sure you're even supposed to gaze at it in the middle distance way that you gaze at museum art. It's lowbrow Wall Street street art. The symbolism goes exactly as deep as bowl is short for the bowl market. Barely more complicated than just a big statue of a dollar sign. But because I went out there so much, I really did start to think a lot about it.

I'd see a hundred people, a hundred different people every time, lined up for a half hour to take a picture with a cheesy symbol of capitalism. And I'd think about how no one I've ever met would do that. I know a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs, but even my friend who's the biggest capitalism cheerleader, she would not come take a picture with a bull statue. But here were maybe a thousand people a day whose opinions about the world were just different from anyone I knew.

And that felt really good to me. It made the world feel big instead of small. I started to suspect that maybe I was actually finally having this experience I'd always wanted, that I saw people having at art museums whenever I was dragged to one. Staring at the bowl was sending me into this weird sort of contemplative fugue state that I wasn't used to.

I was having my first ever experience of reacting to a piece of visual art. For some reason, it was this one. And I wanted to know, what was this weird hypnotic reaction that I and these 1,000 tourists a day were having? What is going on with this bronze bowl? Look, I didn't think this question was going to lead to any kind of story either, but it did. A story about neighborhoods, artists, and gamblers, and about a kind of crime on Wall Street I'd never heard of before.

That story, after some ads.

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A few weeks ago, I got to hear the story of this strange sculpture of a bronze bowl and the much stranger story of the man who made it. I heard it from a journalist, a longtime chronicler of New York City. I'm Christopher Bananos.

I'm the city editor of New York Magazine and the author of a couple of books. What are the books about? I'm the author of A History of Polaroid Photography and a biography of the photographer Ouija. Oh, Ouija the street photographer. Got it. I like Ouija.

So, yeah, I want to talk to you today about a piece of art in New York City that I feel like is not always celebrated as high art, but which I have found that I think a lot about. The Wall Street Bowl, which is actually called the Charging Bowl, but it's like a bronze statue of a bull.

that is actually outside of the office building in which we work. I think when tourists come to New York City, they're like, "I need to see the bowl." But it's in a part of town where there's not a ton to see. Like, Wall Street doesn't really have banks anymore.

It creates this kind of tourist economy around it where there's like a guy selling statues of liberty, key chains, and there's like these tour guides that'll tell you about Hamilton's real life locations in New York City. And there's a hot dog guy and there's an ice cream truck. And none of those people would be here but for the bull. But because there's this piece of like, it's almost like they've dropped a little miniature Times Square thing.

outside of Times Square. You know what I mean? This one little hub of tourism activity. And so lately, that's what I've been thinking about. But I feel like I'm going to stare at it for three more months and I'm going to have a different feeling. And I'm like, I'm curious, is this the experience that other people are having of art all the time?

Well, I have lots of thoughts about that. One is that there is a certain kind of very broad, popular fine art that just clicks with a larger audience than most. And in the 70s and 80s, during the sort of minimalist, abstract sculpture era, there's a whole class of public art artists

that gets put in front of office buildings. And it has broad appeal, and it's often a little bland. Not always, but often a little bland. And...

The derisive nickname that art critics use is they call it plop art. Plop art, because you just plop it somewhere. Because it clunked right down in the middle of the plaza, and it's usually brightly colored. I find the idea of plop art really helpful, because it's like the love statue in Philadelphia where I'm from is definitely a plop art. Oh, there you go. Exactly. What it's useful for is defining a plaza. You know, the plaza in front of an office building is an architectural prop.

because it gets a little windswept and bare. If you put something in the middle of it, it does two things. It marks the spot, it defines the plaza much more effectively, visually, and it provides a talking point and a meeting place. I'll meet you by the big red whatever it is. I'll meet you by the bar. There you go. But a lot of it is sort of used to signal the presence of art.

rather than really to function as art. It's easy to understand. It's a charging bull on Wall Street. The bull is made out of bronze. It is much larger than life-size, maybe 20 feet long.

It doesn't need a lot of decoding. It says what it does on the tin, as the expression goes. Secondarily, obviously, it has become an Instagram object. That's the source of the line outside. Everybody's taking the same picture that they've seen on Instagram under the balls. Oh.

So, like, 10 years ago, there would not necessarily have been the same line. Less. Much less. This is a more recent phenomenon. I mean, it became a tourist attraction. It is a well-loved object. Yeah. And people did find it funny to pose under the...

Under the testicles. But not like now. The line running down the block is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Interesting. And every city has a number of these sites now where people go to take the same picture that everybody else does. You know the spot in Brooklyn by the Manhattan Bridge? Yeah. Where everybody takes the same picture down the – I think it's – is it –

I can't remember the name of the street. Forgive me. Is it Water Street in Brooklyn? I'm not sure, but I know the street you're talking about. It just perfectly frames the bridge. That's right. And there are two brick warehouses on either side. And there's a picture of the bridge going up in 1909 that is precisely the same buildings on both sides. And everyone replicates it on Instagram, but now it's, you know, a tourist from Omaha or Shanghai posing in the same spot. I'll tell you. So the first...

The first several months of standing in front of the bowl, what I would think about is there's always a huge line of people who are really excited about it. And there's one really big line to touch. The bowl has testicles. Very large testicles. Huge testicles. Huge testicles. And the balls are like more shiny where they've been rubbed off from people touching them. People love the bowl's balls.

What do you make of that? I think it's just the dirty joke of it. Right. Or the naughty joke of it, because it's not actually dirty. No, it doesn't. It feels like it's... It's a teehee. Yeah. I will also say that the statue, I think, is shaped...

to display them a little. The rear legs are splayed a little bit and the balls are sort of set back slightly. I don't think you weren't not supposed to notice them. Let's put it that way. But so I guess what I was going to ask you is, is it just like a funny accident that the things people were looking for in public art before the internet, which is like, you know, you want something that is simple and obvious. You want it to be in a place that

people will either visit or want to visit because of the art, and also that the art should have a way to interact with it. Are those also the things that a piece of art that Instagram is going to like? Do those things shake hands? You know what I mean? I think they do. The interaction thing is interesting because most art, obviously, you can't touch. There are plenty of old public statues elsewhere in the world that have similar sort of...

Touch points. You know, the statue of Winston Churchill outside the House of Commons in Britain, which has been there since, I don't know, the end of World War II or something like that. It was put up, you know, after he was prime minister. So maybe in the 60s. The toe is bright because members of parliament rub it on their way in the door. Oh, for luck. For luck.

And do the people who make this kind of art, is it like, I'm assuming the answer is it depends, but does everyone try to figure out what is Winston Churchill's toe? What is the bull's balls or does it just happen? I think some people think about it and others don't. I would guess it is more often a happy accident. And I'm guessing, I mean, I'm not trying to be like a space alien to the world of fine art. Like I know some things. I'm guessing that in the world of fine art,

Generally speaking, the people who are making mass appeal public art stuff are like, it's not the top of the prestige hierarchy. Well, that is somewhat true. It's a continuum.

But it's true, for example, that the guy behind the Wall Street Bowl, Arturo De Modica, was kind of poo-pooed by the art establishment. And can you tell me more about him, like sort of his career in New York City prior to making this bowl? He was an immigrant from southern Italy who came here to make a splash in the early 70s. And he had that sort of make-it-in-America, huckster quality of a pop culture artist, if you like. Yeah.

He certainly thought of himself as a maker of fine art, but clearly he wanted to get famous and he wanted to make stuff with broad appeal. He was explicit about, I make my art for the people, that kind of thing. And he was a big, gruff character. I met him only once, but I've talked to people who knew him better, and they described the person I met that one time. You know, that he was like...

sort of volcanic in the sort of stereotypical Italian artist kind of way, you know? He'd come here looking like a sculptor of the late 60s or early 70s, you know, sort of like a hairy-chested denim shirt kind of guy. And what was the, like, Soho art scene that he was operating at the time, what was that scene like? Well...

It's sort of hard to imagine now, but the Soho art scene in the 70s was really something special, especially in the early 70s when you first got here. The Soho of the 1960s had been a factory district for 100 years. Those big loft buildings with the big arched windows and the cast iron facades had all been factories, light industry to medium industry factories, and they made everything, underwear, gears, paper boxes, everything.

for the country and the world. And that business had started to decline in the 50s and 60s. A bunch of things happened. Suburbanization happened, and the Lower East Side stopped being the most packed

residential district in America. And that's where all the workers came from. It was the poor people of the Lower East Side would walk over to what is now Soho and work in the paper box and underwear factories. So those buildings started to empty out. And certain changes were taking place, too. People were moving to the suburbs, but also the interstate highway system was up so you could move goods around the country more easily. You didn't have to have the concentration in cities that you had. It was a lot easier to make a factory in...

let's say, South Carolina next to a highway instead of in lower Manhattan where you couldn't get the trucks in and everything had to go into a freight elevator. It's much easier just throwing out the loading dock somewhere a lot simpler. And, well, you know, you have a different labor force there. Yeah.

but you can get people to work there. So the jobs started to flow away from New York dramatically. That's why New York got so rough in the 1970s. I never knew that. We lost almost a million people in the 1970s. The city went from approximately, I mean, I'm approximating, but roughly 8 million to roughly 7 million. And?

And some of it was just to the south and the west, right? Just because the space was better and, you know, easier. And also you got away from the New York unions, which were very strong. Right, so labor costs were lower. That's right. So all of that meant that this district downtown of sooty old buildings that were aging was empty. And I mean empty. If you walked around Soho at night in 1960...

You would not see a single light on in those buildings. They were mostly either unrented by the mid-60s or, in many cases, abandoned because there were so few tenants that they couldn't pay the taxes. And the fire department in New York stopped answering calls in that neighborhood. They would just let them burn, you know? It was called Hell's Hundred Acres by the fire department.

So, we had this completely empty neighborhood in lower Manhattan. And around 1965 or so, a few artists discovered, realized, decided that a big empty factory floor that was a foot of concrete thick and had 20-foot ceilings and industrial-grade plumbing was probably a good place to make big metal sculptures or 20-foot paintings. Ha!

or other kinds of art that also kind of needed a factory, you know? And a few of these folks came. A number of them had been at Yale. A guy named Alan Capra was one of the early ones. Chuck Close was one of the earliest ones. And they all started taking these floors, and it was illegal. They were not zoned residential. So they would rent it as studio space, but they would sleep there. And they would build it out as an apartment illegally and secretly.

You weren't allowed to have a kitchen, so you'd put it behind a partition or something. You weren't supposed to sleep there. So everybody had a fake...

It was a model stand. It was a plinth on which the model would pose to be sculpted, and a bed slid out from it. They would wire it up for lighting if the electricity was off or whatever. They would steal power from the street lamp outside. Chuck Close, I interviewed him once, and he said he figured out how to turn on the gas meter

and then turn it off before the monthly inspection and replace the dust on top of the wheel so it did not appear that he had touched it. He would steal gas.

He hired a guy to plumb out his apartment who was Philip Glass, who was working as a plumber during the day. And he's a better composer than a plumber. Wow. Yes. Other guys, because some of these guys were painters, art painters, became the other kind of painters. They would paint lofts. It's so funny. It's this weird thing. It's like you imagine a revolving door where...

The spaces for factory workers are being filled with artists, but the artists are doing trades. But then, like, it's such a, it's so funny, like a city reinventing itself. The relationship between fine art, especially the sort of more robust fine arts like sculpture, you know, and industrial craft, they're not always so far apart, you know? If you're a sculptor who's a really good welder, you can also get work as a sculptor.

welder of, you know, truck parts or whatever, you know, in another way. And sometimes if you need a day job, that's what you end up doing, right? So anyway, I got off the track. It's so nice to see this. And I know, like, I knew that Soho, you know, one of the most expensive places and one of the most expensive cities in the world, everyone

Well, it used to be empty. It used to be artists. But I hadn't known. I'd never seen it clearly. Well, so what happened then was by the early 70s, the art scene was really robust and the galleries had started to open on the ground floors of these buildings. There was still a rather rough neighborhood to live in. Very few people had children. Again, it was illegal until the early 70s. The law had to be changed and the neighborhood had to be rezoned. But until then, you weren't supposed to live there.

The law changed to allow what was called an artist-in-residence. If you were a working artist, you were allowed to live in this formerly industrial zone. And in fact, what you would do in these days when these buildings were fire traps was put a sign next to the buzzer that said AIR2, artist-in-residence, second floor. And that way, if they came, they knew somebody was living there and they couldn't just leave.

let it go. Oh, wow. It's like a message to the fire department being like, there's a human life. There's a human being up there. Yes. Don't, don't just, don't just let it take its course. Wow. Yeah. So that was, that was the big shift that was going on.

The other thing I should mention is that the artists liked these spaces for their innate qualities. Good for industry, good for big equipment. The other thing is that they were dirt cheap. You could get a floor in 1965 of a big building on Green or Worcester Street for $50 a month. And let me tell you,

And again, from that same Chuck Close interview, he said when he got here a year or two after a couple of his friends from Yale, he paid $150 a month. And they said, you're nuts. You got taken. And a couple of years after that, he and I don't know how many friends it was, they each had a floor in the same building. And it came up for sale. And they had the opportunity to buy it.

And some of them didn't want to. And he said he persuaded them. He said, it's all going up. You've got to get it now.

And what happened, I think they said they paid $30,000 for the whole building, something like that. And what he told me was within two or three years, the ground floor restaurant was paying all of their rents and then some. They were making money. You know, the rent was less than it would have cost them for the whole mortgage. It's so funny because it's like we don't, you know, I mean…

Not to overgeneralize, but we're not a country that particularly loves to subsidize art or artists. This little window. Accidentally. And gentrification, like a thing that none of us love, but it just happened to work at this one time in this one particular way. This was the first gentrification story for all practical... I mean, you could argue that Greenwich Village earlier got gentrified by the influx of Bohemians in the sort of Bob Dylan years. But really and truly, this was an early example of gentrification, but it was also not the toxic...

fast-moving, throw-out-the-families-that-have-been-here-for-generations kind of gentrification that we saw a lot of later on and continue to see because this was nobody. There was no one being displaced. The only things being displaced were piles of rags in these buildings. It's so crazy. Yeah.

So, okay, so I can understand, I guess, then why a sculptor from Italy would hear stories like this, to be like, hey, there's this place where, you know, space is cheap, or even, like, space was cheap, but it's getting a little bit more expensive, but there's, like, a scene here, and you should come and be a part of it. But he wouldn't have totally fit in because the stuff they're doing, or maybe not, like, what he's doing...

That sounds like a place for people who are going to be celebrated in a high art way. It doesn't sound like a place where you come build a studio if the lane of art you're in is like the Love Statue of Philadelphia. Well, that's not quite right because A, the art world back then was tiny, tiny.

tiny and it could all sort of fit in a teacup compared to today. Second, the love statue in Philadelphia is by Robert Indiana who lived in a law firm and had to slip.

So it was all one thing back then. I mean, of course there was a range between like really hard to understand performance art and, you know, really sort of easy to love paintings by Robert Indiana. But the world of art was so much tinier that they could all sort of coexist. And, you know, I'm sure there were guys who was like, oh, Arturo, that guy, he's nothing or whatever. And I'm sure he was contemptuous of some of the stranger stuff out there. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's how you know you have a scene. You have a bunch of people who are going to the same parties and talking to each other. Arguing over art in the cafes at night. Yeah. I mean, is there anything healthier than a scene like that? It's why cities exist. Half the reason cities exist. So people in the same profession, whether it's Wall Street or art or movies or fashion, can hang out late at night when they're young and argue with each other over drinks and cigarettes. That's the

the core of civilization, if you ask me. But today it feels like, I mean, not to be like, not everything has to be nostalgia for what once was, but like, that doesn't exist and that hasn't really been replicated in another place in the same way, has it? The problem now is that it's very hard to exist in

in that mode when your rent is no longer $50 or even $150 a month. You almost have to have a straight day job to live in New York now. There are artists who carry it off, whatever. There are people with private incomes, God bless them, who can carry it off. But fundamentally, there isn't a mass of people who don't have to work themselves to the bone in an office or a coffee shop or something to make art on the side. Yeah. You know, whereas you used to be able to do it with part-time gigs...

the way Philip Glass would install your dishwasher. So you had a lot of time. You could, you know, if you were hungover the next day, you didn't take a job. Yeah. You know what I mean? Now, you got to get up and go to work because your rent is...

thousands of dollars a month. It's so weird this year, for whatever reason, it just feels like everything ends up being a housing story. It's like, why is there a giant bronze bowl? Well, it's, you know, every New York story, this is a theory of mine, and I work on a lot of real estate coverage of the magazine, so I think about it all the time. Every New York story, if you burrow down deep enough, turns into a real estate story because so much of your real estate situation determines everything else you can do.

Every story is a real estate story. Real estate, as a phrase, is capturing more here than it sometimes does. I feel like for some people, real estate just means homes rich people buy. But Christopher is talking about so much more here. What kind of person moves to a city? And when they get here, what kinds of choices do they get to make? Real estate is part of what decides whether Philip Glass turns out to be a celebrated composer or a somewhat lousy plumber. Whether he moves to New York from Baltimore at all.

It describes the risks any of us can afford to take. The story of Arturo de Modica, the man who would create the Wall Street Bowl, is wrapped up in real estate in an almost perfect way. Arturo was born the son of a grocery store owner in a small town in Sicily. He wanted to be a sculptor, and so, without his family's approval, he took a steam train to Florence, where he went to art school. By the early 70s, Arturo's ambitions had outgrown his country, and so he moved to New York City.

Arturo De Modica died a few years ago, but this is from an interview he did for an Italian TV station. Arturo is, I have to say, a bit of a fox, a dashing, bearded Italian man with warm eyes. In photos, you often see his prodigious chest hair coiling out of a painter's suit. Here, he's talking about why he moved to America, about his desire to live in a very large country and make very large works of art. Arturo De Modica

Later in the interview, Arturo says that when he arrived in New York, somehow he managed to get a ride in a helicopter, and from up there, he could see the city and the direction it was moving in. A few years before Arturo's arrival, the painter Chuck Close had told his friends to buy in Soho. He'd said it was all going to go up. These artists, acting like investors, Arturo joined the ranks.

He says from the helicopter, he chose the neighborhood where he'd place his bet, the same one as theirs. He found, in the mid-'70s, a burnt-out hole on Crosby Street of a building. As I said, a lot of buildings burned down in the 1960s and 70s in Soho.

And he got hold of it. I don't know how he raised the money. I think he borrowed some of it from his dealer, and I think he borrowed some of it from somebody who'd bought one of his sculptures against, like, a future purchase or something. But he bought a vacant lot that was a hole. The building had burned down, so it was a basement, you know? This is like a crater almost. Pretty close, yeah. You know, collapsed in. Yeah. And...

He scraped up, I wish I remembered the figure. I think it was like $10,000 or something. And he set to building a studio there himself, entirely by hand. This is the craziest thing I had ever heard when I heard it. But he told me and I saw it with my own eyes. And he just started building there. He bought...

I also don't know how much he embroidered these stories, by the way. But he bought a truckload of bricks from a priest, for example. What was a priest doing with a truckload of bricks? I don't really know. But he did it. And he had manual labor skills. He'd been a sculptor and craftsman, right? So he started putting up this building on Crosby Street. And it's a brick facade. It's two stories high.

And it's plain but not severe. It's just understated, I would say. It looks like an industrial building that had been in the neighborhood. It's not elaborate like the cast iron ones around it. But it's, you know, it looks like a serviceable industrial. It's very, it doesn't look like a DIY kind of slobby whatever. It's very, very crisply made. You know, a little understated ornament along the cornice. It's not bad. And he made it livable.

moved in, and then he decided he wanted more space. And instead of going up, he went down. He dug a basement with a bucket and a pickaxe. He went down another floor into the Manhattan...

substrate. I don't know if he went into bedrock. That seems impossible. But, I mean, what the heck? That's crazy. I might add that he didn't get a building permit for any of this. He just did it. He did all of it. He did all of it. I think he had a friend who helped him out now and then. But he fundamentally did all of it. I asked him about the basement and the only thing he said to me, I swear this is true, he just nodded and closed his eyes and said, yes, I was very tired.

Yeah.

You think? Who does that? Who does that? Well, Arturo DeMarco, that's who does that. It was the wildest story. And really, the building, it was not just a box either. It had like... When you went inside, there was a sort of... It was two floors and it's sort of a third. There was a kind of a terrace in the back that he slept on. It had this zigzag staircase going around. It was rather like... Rather sophisticated as a piece of... Certainly for a piece of homebrew architecture. And even...

for a piece of architecture that was, you know, not by somebody who was DIYing it. It was pretty pulled together. He had, I remember, as decor, this giant...

It was a wooden screw made from a log that he said had been part of a wine press in his hometown in Sicily that he had shipped over, I guess. And it was maybe 20 feet long. I mean, a huge thing, you know, the size of a telephone pole. And it was – he had it – I think he had two pieces of it across as decorative beams in the upper part of the space, you know. It was –

I assume that was part of the decor he was thinking of for the bar, because it's a wine press, you know? It looked good. It looked really good. By the 2000s, this was a $3, $4, $5 million building. Wow. And so he cashed out late in life, and he had all the money he needed. Literal sweat equity. So he ended up becoming a multimillionaire not because of his audacious art, but more because he just built...

An unpermitted factory by hand in a bombed-out basement. Retroactively permitted. The story was that at some point along the way, the department buildings got wind of this thing. And they sent an inspector out, and he was like, this is all...

So retroactively accepted as a building, and presumably they cleaned up the legal aspect of it later. But I think he made plenty of money as an artist. I don't think he was a flop as an artist. But the real estate sure didn't hurt. After a short break, a 300-year history of Wall Street, because why not? And then what happens when an Italian sculptor decides to get his revenge on a city that hasn't been paying him his due?

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Terms and restrictions apply. See site for details. Wall Street sits on the southern part of the island of Manhattan. I've heard the name so many times and never wondered if there ever was a real wall there, but there was once. When the Dutch ran Manhattan in the 1600s, they called it New Amsterdam. The Dutch were the ones who built the wall. It was meant to keep out Native Americans, pirates, and the British. It didn't work. The British sailed into New Amsterdam and took it over.

They renamed it New York after their duke and tore down the wall a few decades later. Wall Street, as a phrase, is shorthand for the idea of financial trading, which has happened here for over 200 years, before computers, before phones. In the 1700s, ships would arrive to Manhattan's harbor, and captains of those ships would head to the nearby Tontine Coffee House, where they registered their cargo — tobacco, wheat, cotton, and back then, enslaved people.

The Wall Street slave market did not close until 1762. In the late 1700s, financial trading in New York still happened at this coffeehouse. It would later be renamed the New York Stock and Exchange. I understand I'm starting to sound like one of the tour guides that haunts this neighborhood, but still. In the 1800s, the Stock Exchange became just a rented room on Wall Street, full of merchants and brokers arguing about the prices of securities. Soon, they'll build a permanent Stock Exchange that will recognizably begin to become the modern one.

One year, the ticker appears, the telephone, the bell, the terminal. Over time, there's this huge surge in the volume of betting, of trade, of incomprehensibility. If there was a place where you could see American capitalism, an abstract idea, actually happening, it'd be here at the exchange on Wall Street.

As far away as that world of Wall Street can seem from the art world, what they very much have in common is that they're about people who spend all day trying to convince other people that things are valuable. They're governed not just by supply and demand, but by persuasion and moxie and all the tricks we use to infuse ordinary things with desire. By 1977, Arturo de Modica had been living in Soho for a few years, the neighborhood he called Il Bucco Nero, the Black Hole.

He didn't own any property there yet. He was still an unknown artist. He'd just held an art exhibition at a gallery, a selection of large, abstract Marvel statues, which it turns out nobody wanted. The New York Times critic he personally called to invite to the show hung up on him. This setback would inspire what Arturo called his first art action, his brazen response to this disrespect, to the loud, clear message that his statues were worthless.

He didn't get a lot of attention, and he wanted attention, so he commenced a stunt, which is that he put them all in a truck and took them to Rockville Center in the middle of the night and he dropped them on the plaza. And

And these things weighed tons, you know. They were not little tabletop objects. And, of course, that got into the papers. Crazy Italian artist, you know, sets up his own show in the middle of Midtown. Yeah. And did exactly what he wanted. You know, he understood how to get attention.

It's so funny because it's like the rules he's breaking are like, they're not, like one of the ways we reward artists is for breaking rules in terms of how they make things. He's more breaking rules of how. How we show things. Yes. Yes. And it was just transgressive enough because like nobody gets hurt when you do that. Yeah. Nothing gets destroyed. It's just, you're not supposed to do that. It's kinky. That's it, precisely. Arturo De Modica would repeat this stunt again and again.

dropping unauthorized art in public places, an art heist in reverse. He did it at Lincoln Center one Valentine's Day, dropping off a statue of a horse with a note, quote, Be my Valentine, NY. Love, AD. The stunts brought attention. The attention brought customers. The customers brought money. Arturo bought a Ferrari. Arturo seemed to love America and American capitalism the way successful immigrants often do.

Capitalism often breaks its promises, but that just hadn't been Arturo's experience.

which would explain why he had an unusual reaction in October 1987, when, after a few years of the number mainly going up, the American stock market precipitously crashed. Black Monday. They're calling it the Monday Massacre, the worst drop in Wall Street history. Around the world, stock markets fell faster than a skydiver without a parachute. Hour after hour today, wave after wave of selling hit the stock market. A selling panic, the professionals call it. A lot of people panicked.

Arturo decided this was his opportunity to give back to the country and its stockbrokers. In the entire history of the world, has an artist ever felt bad for a stockbroker? Have they ever made a piece of art to cheer them up? Arturo says in this interview he wanted to make a very strong animal that charges towards the future, charges for the young people, for a better America.

He says people told him that he should make a bear because we were in a bear market, but no. He wanted an America that moved forward, always charged. He would spend two years and $350,000 of his own money casting a bronze bull that weighed over three and a half tons. He'd cast the bull in his basement studio, which, remember, he dug out with a pickaxe and a bucket in the two-story building he'd made with truckloads of bricks.

December 14th, 1989, he goes out to the location with a watch. He times it out. The police patrol every five to six minutes. That's one minute to drop the bull, four and a half to get away. Arturo's crew shows up in the dead of night. He says they put the bull down with a crane and a truck and fled. And that the next morning it was pandemonium. According to Arturo, they were on the front pages of all the newspapers. They removed the bull, which was right in front of the stock market.

And the city removed it immediately the next day or within days. They impounded it, you know, like it was an abandoned Chevy. Which is sort of crazy because it's a huge...

I'm imagining very heavy piece of work. It's bronze. Yeah. It's, well, I mean, the city knows how to move things like that. They have other public art that they move around. But it was a big object and they hauled it out to an impound yard somewhere. And the funny thing is there was sort of like affection for it. I think because it was a bull and the Wall Street guys responded to it, because it was the peak of the

Wolf of Wall Street kind of... Gordon Gekko years, if you like. And, you know, the traders dug it. They felt like it spoke to them for whatever reason. You know, the bull is snorting and pawing at the earth and straining to do something. He's a macho bull. He knows bulls go. And you have to assume that a certain kind of...

type A testosterone guy on a trading floor across the street would say, "Never mind those minimalist paintings that are all the same color. Ask for me!" And people still respond to it, as you know, from the line outside. Yeah. Today, the bull no longer sits outside the stock exchange where Arturo first dropped it. After the city impounded his sculpture, Arturo paid a $500 fine to get it out. And the city agreed to plop the bull nearby.

Can I interview you very quickly? Sorry, we don't speak English very well. From Spain.

These days, the line for the bull, it's not Wall Street traders. It's a mix of tourists visiting from other countries and first-generation immigrants. Everyone I spoke to seemed to have heard the same story about what the bull meant.

It's good luck. It's prosperity. My son works in a stock company. Yeah. He said that, mom, mom, you should go to touch the food. So your son works in the stock market and he asked you to come take a picture for good luck? Yes. Yes.

So the question of why these people are drawn to the bowl. Yeah, they're here because they heard about the magic bowl on TikTok, the one which brings good luck to the people who take pictures of it. But saying they're tourists here because of the internet doesn't quite capture it.

These photos they're taking fall somewhere between superstition and a kind of low-key religious pilgrimage. Touching the bull is a small prayer, meant to borrow a little of the power of this place, the power of the things that have happened here, of the people who came and made their fortunes. I think sometimes about how I like a complicated story, but the simple ones are more powerful. They travel further.

Nobody in this line likely knows who Arturo de Modica was, but they understand the meaning of his bowl just fine. Arturo was almost 50 when he plopped the bowl in this neighborhood. He died at 80 in February of 2021. In the obituary that our guest Christopher Bananos wrote for him, he said that Arturo cashed out in the aughts. He sold the building on Crosby Street, used the money to start a sculpture school back home in Sicily. The interior of his basement studio was turned into a minimalist retail store.

The giant wine screw is gone. Christopher says in that building, quote, "'You have the story of Soho. From unlivable shack to handmade outlaw home to art party space to seven-figure real estate play. All in 20 years.'" When Arturo de Modica died, he was working on one last piece, a sculpture for his hometown. Two 40-foot-high horses would have been his largest yet. I have no doubt that their balls would have been tremendous."

Coming up after some ads, we have found a strange artifact on the internet for your enjoyment. Search Engine producer Noah John, you have a recommendation this week.

Yeah. So my recommendation this week is another TikTok trend, another heartwarming, wholesome TikTok trend. Tell me what is happening on TikTok, a website that I have abandoned because the algorithm serves me such hell that it makes me doubt my soul. So one thing that the algorithm's been serving me a lot of, aside from hell, is Snoopy edits. Snoopy edits? As in Snoopy the dog on top of the house. What's your relationship with Peanuts Cartoons?

I read them as a kid. They weren't like Calvin and Hobbes level meaningful to me, but it gives me like a vague feeling of warmth, nostalgia. And I think when you're a kid, it's your first exposure to the idea of depression. And as like a blue kid, I liked it for that reason. Yeah.

I didn't grow up reading the cartoons, but I loved Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. But with this trend, what it kind of is, is usually videos, sometimes pictures or slideshows of Snoopy.

with really happy or like bittersweet music behind them. And what they kind of express is how Snoopy copes with loneliness, I think is a way that a lot of people find they can relate to. Like my favorite one right here shows him like lifting weights. Okay, so it's literally it's Snoopy at a gym. Yeah, lifting a barbell chest press and it says lifting weights in meme font.

Life is good, though. I want y'all to see that life is great. Your life is great, too. Have a good time, man. That's an edit of a Mac Miller interview. Michelle Snoopy waiting for his dinner, thinking about Miss Snoopy. Lifting weights. Lifting weights. Cooking. Watching TV alone in bed. I'm out of here. I'll be back soon. So it's like the emotional space it's conjuring really is...

young man in your 20s like where you're like alone a lot of the time for the first time it's like You're doing it, but it's like melancholy I think it's really like trying to find beauty and the little things like the things that people Try to find distractions in while they're doing or just like don't really find pleasant Yeah, Snoopy's able to find little moments of joy and then a lot of the other memes show him more like

explicitly overjoyed by things. It's such an interesting... The thing that I like about it, I guess, or appreciate about it is I feel like memes for the 10 years before this, the range of feelings they captured compared to this feels a little bit narrow. You know, it's like, you're really happy, you're really anxious, you're really mad, this is really funny. But this is like, it's like inviting you to feel a feeling that's highly specific. You know, it's like inviting you to feel like,

You should emulate Snoopy and you should try to find joy in the quotidian moments in your life. Like that's a very strange thing for a meme to address. Yeah. That's really nice. Noah, thank you. Thank you, PJ. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinnamanini and is produced by Garrett Graham and me, Noah John. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarian.

Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Special thanks to Nicole Gulotta for translating the Italian interviews for us. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Shuff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. If you want to help our fledging show, the best thing you can do is rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. See you next week.