Art is extremely subjective.

Everybody has their own opinion, and sometimes those opinions are very strong.

One recent example, in the summer of 2024, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he had commissioned a statue of his wife, Priscilla.

The statue version of Priscilla was seven feet tall, bright teal green, and wrapped in a kind

of curling wave of metal type thing. The reviews, which are certainly tinged by who Mark Zuckerberg is and what he does for a living,

they weren't great.

They ranged from strange to yikes to pointless and arbitrary, with one critic saying the statue looked AI generated.

Whatever you think about the statue, I do want to say something in defense of Mark Zuckerberg.

He put it in his own backyard.

Like, you don't have to see it.

You don't have to look at it.

Whatever.

But sometimes, this is not the case.

Today, I want to tell you the story of someone kind of similar to Zuckerberg, a guy who made

tons and tons of money, maybe more money than he even knew what to do with.

And like Zuckerberg, he became interested in commissioning works of art.

But there was a key difference because he put these works of art in public.

And they were not very well received, as in picked up and thrown into the lake kind of received.

Now the statue is just a charming eccentricity, but back in 1880, not so much.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And we are headed to the town of Rockville, Connecticut, visiting a statue that was so hated that it was torn down, thrown in a lake, put back up, torn down again, and just so on and so on.

That is after this.

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