World's Ugliest Public Art

An 18th-century Portuguese monk who pioneered hypnotic techniques, Abbé Faria was honored in 1945 in the city of his birth with this rather unwholesome tribute. The novelist Evelyn Waugh called the thing “wildly vivacious,” saying that it captured the illustrious abbé at the “climax of an experiment, rampant over an entranced female.” Be that as it may, it’s easy to imagine that the abbé’s prostrate subject wishes that she could call the whole thing off and make a run for the beach instead.

Ever wish that public clocks were harder to use? Then this overblown work, built in 1999 to celebrate the millennium, has your number. Mounted on a building facing buzzing Union Square, it includes a brick wall with a disembodied hand and a hole that halfheartedly belches steam at noon and midnight, an easily overlooked sphere that tracks the moon’s phases, and a faux metronome/pendulum that does…nothing. To the left is a row of 15 LED digits: to use this tourist-puzzler of a clock, check out the first four digits to get the (military-style) time of day. Ignore the rest.

It’s a puzzle: why did the Fulham Football Club’s owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed (father of Dodi), place this stiff and unnatural statue of the begloved one directly outside the team’s stadium? Jackson is alleged to have attended only one game. In truth, Al-Fayed originally wanted an MJ statue to be outside Harrods, the posh department store he also owns. There’s no word on why he changed the location from a shopping paradise to a sporting one.

Standing at more than 300 feet tall, Zurab Tsereteli’s 1997 sculpture of Peter the Great commemorates the czar’s maritime feats. Produced at enormous expense on an island on the Moscow River, the stainless-steel, bronze, and copper statue has never gotten much love from locals. (In fact, persistent rumors claim that “Peter” was once meant to be Christopher Columbus, but that Tsereteli couldn’t find a city to take him on.) Most of Moscow would love to find this controversial white elephant a new home, but the cost of relocation or demolition make it likely that Peter will remain anchored here for some time.

Sculpted by Seward Johnson, a high-kitsch artist with works as loathed as they are beloved, this 26-foot-tall aluminum photo op has been drawing sniggerers to a park near the Magnificent Mile (it’s there until Spring 2012). Inspired by The Seven Year Itch, it captures the moment when a rushing subway car brought a breeze up through a street grate, hiking up Marilyn’s dress, cooling her ankles, and raising onlookers’ heart rates in the process.

Frank Stella’s status as a blue-chip artist didn’t stop the people of Seoul from objecting to this 30-foot hunk of metal installed outside a steel company’s HQ. Named for an acquaintance of Stella’s who died in an air crash, the 1997 work brings to mind flower petals from some angles—and a terrible accident from most others. But it wasn’t popular enough with the public from any angle. When a plan to move it to a museum was deemed too pricey, the city attempted to camouflage it with a small group of trees instead.

Created by the provocateur and artist David Černý, this sculpture of two swiveling, copper-clad bros urinating into a pool shaped like the Czech Republic is a high-tech homage to Brussels’ beloved Manneken Pis. In an experiential twist, you can send a text message to the sculpture (the number’s on a plaque nearby), and the accommodating animatronic dudes will “write” your text in the water.

Spread over 80 acres, this sylvan expanse is enlivened by more than 200 works by Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943), whose highly mystical and goth-friendly style often seems to reflect the fatalism of the first half of the 20th century. If a relief of a couple embracing a skeleton (kinky!) or the statue of a Goliath-like figure being attacked by irate babies doesn’t disrupt your picnic, then maybe admiring the sculptures of a woman prancing with snaky dreadlocks will.

The proudly gaudy works of French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle turn up in parks and museums the world over. This piece, done in collaboration with Jean Tinguely, depicts a round-rumped woman holding on for dear life to a gaudy bird with beefy legs and huge red talons. If she’s taking comfort in a monster like this, though, you have to wonder what she just saw behind her.

Given its pedestrian-flattening size and an extravagant number of wrinkles, there’s much to find opposable (ahem) in César Baldaccini’s 40-foot-tall model of his own thumb. That said, it’s a perky, positive digit that more than holds its own among the high-rise offices and headquarters in Paris’s La Défense district. And in any case it could be worse—at least Baldaccini didn’t choose a different finger of his to immortalize.

Between unmanned check-in kiosks, overpriced sandwiches, and stressful security lines, the modern airport holds much that’s unpleasant, but to our knowledge only DIA makes you face down a 32-foot, darker-than-a-Smurf hell beast. The rearing, 4.5-ton fiberglass horse seems poised to stomp on innocent travelers just trying to leave town. All joking aside, the statue really is a killer—its creator, Luis Jiménez, died when a section fell on him in his studio.

This dazed or possibly dead rabbit seems unaware of the swarm of mice that shares its busted-up crate. Positioned outside of Albert Dürer’s house in Nuremberg, the nightmarish sculpture by Jürgen Goertz is a satiric take on a much more pleasingly proportioned bunny—the one immortalized in Dürer’s watercolor Der Feldhase.