Previous rumors of new Miami Marlins owner Derek Jeter’s desire to remove the stadium’s dinger sculpture will not be coming to fruition, as Miami-Dade County officials have spoken up to clarify that it is a work of public art that cannot be moved.
The sculpture is the property of the county: public art commissioned and “designed specifically for this project and location,” as head of Miami-Dade County’s cultural affairs arm Michael Spring told the Miami Herald today. (A helpful clarifying comment, as the sculpture is definitely indistinct enough to pass for any project or location.)
The sculpture cost $2.5 million and was required as part of the local Art in Public Places program, which mandates that county-constructed buildings include art. As former team owner Jeffrey Loria fleeced the city for hundreds of millions of public funding for the stadium, it is a county-constructed building which, therefore, needs some art. This is what they have, and it’s “permanently installed,” according to Spring. “It is not moveable.”
To any of Jeter’s self-serious ideas about respectability or propriety or what constitutes “art”—nah, Jeets. The statue stays.