Sebastian Errazuriz's golden calf pinata. Via Sebastian Errazuriz/Facebook.
Sebastian Errazuriz caused quite a scene of the streets of Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood last week with a giant, cash-stuffed piñata shaped like a golden cow, reports Gothamist.
The glittering statue is meant to recall another iconic bovine: Arturo Di Modica's famed Wall Street Bull, which has become an internationally recognized symbol of the stock market's resilience and capitalism's bullishness. The piñata is also an obvious reference to the golden calf, that false god worshiped by the Hebrews as they wandered the desert in search of the promised land.
An Instagram image of newspaper coverage of the golden cash cow's destruction.
Via Sebastian Errazuriz's Facebook page.
There was an enticing extra incentive to take part in the collective calf-smashing, in case anti-Wall Street sentiment alone didn't cut it: 1,000 $1 dollar bills stuffed inside the piñata, in a grown-up spin on the candy-stuffed versions so popular at children's birthday parties.
Predictably, participants quickly reverted to a capitalistic "every man for himself" mentality the minute the money began to rain, pushing and shoving one another while grabbing fistfuls of $1 bills—not that the artist expected anything else. "The people will be really excited to destroy the (symbol of) capital [and] will then end up running for the capital," he told the Daily News.
The papier mâché piece was created by Errazuriz as part of NYCxDESIGN, the city-wide design festival that ran through May 20. The artist's first solo museum exhibition, "Sebastian Errazuriz: Look Again" will open at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art on September 6.