I thought this was clever.
As an aside-- I do have a problem with museum art. Not the art that seeks to preserve four- or five-hundred-year-old paintings that have stood the test of time and need specialized care. I'm thinking contemporary pieces. If you have to go to a museum to see your installation art, or your painting or your photography, that's just wrong. It ghettoizes art. It makes it the province of jargony specialists. If it's not something people would put in their living rooms or in a public park, or on the street, to me, it fails. Art should be part of the everyday, not walled up in an expensive museum and only brought out as part of an exhibit. And if a significant portion of the public can't appreciate it on some level, that's a fail too. Art that is so cryptic it only speaks to the initiated is gnostic and elitist. It doesn't have to be as obvious or low-brow as dogs playing poker, but it needs to speak to an audience beyond those who study Critical Theory.
That being said, Terracotta Daughters is clever and well-executed, and the idea of burying the statues is kinda cute, but burying those statues seems to be a bit of a shame. They will end up in some museum.
What I would prefer is for them to be nailed to a platform in a public square, where people sit down on benches and eat their lunch so they can contemplate this piece. I hope that ends up being their fate.
