When famous people die, we honor them with ugly bronze statues. Why?

Last month, in Tina Turner’s hometown of Brownsville, Tennessee, a bronze statue honoring the late singer was erected.

When famous people die, people want to remember them. A statue goes up, and people start remembering. The thing about the Tina Turner statue is that it is, as fans pointed out, extremely ugly and looks nothing like the not-ugly Tina Turner. Thankfully, some noted, Turner was not alive to see it.

The rest of us were not as fortunate.

Perhaps even stranger than the idea that someone thinks Tina Turner looks like that is that Turner is merely the latest victim of a bad “lifelike” statue.

Back in 2009, the town of Celoron, New York, witnessed the unveiling of a statue known colloquially as “Scary Lucy,” a figure that was supposed to honor Lucille Ball but ended up looking more like a villain from a Bavarian fairytale whose primary purpose is to scare children. There’s also the infamously crooked Cristiano Ronaldo bust from 2017 that looks like it was made by a scorned rival, rather than an admiring fan. NBA star Dwyane Wade has one too, as does the late actor James Dean.

These bad statues raise an obvious question: Why are these bronze statues so bad? And so many others: If they’re bad and so many people think they’re awful, who keeps making them and who keeps commissioning them? Is there a larger conspiracy at hand, perhaps a cabal of sculptors who hate Lucille Ball and Dwyane Wade? If we want to honor people we adore, why then do we keep making ugly statues of them?

Why haven’t we freed ourselves from the chokehold of ugly bronze statues?

The visceral reaction to the Tina Turner statue was largely due to what people believe is misrepresentation. The Tina Turner in their minds — shaped by performances, music videos, photos, interviews, and their own experiences — did not match up with the foreboding, bronze effigy that was also supposed to be Tina Turner.

What appears to be Tina Turner’s hair is too big, too bulbous — it bears a resemblance to the orange Looney Tunes villain known as Gossamer. Her statue’s self-satisfied smile is deeply menacing, partly because it is smiling with its top teeth showing. Why is it smiling? Why is it smiling like that? Why does statue Tina Turner have claw-like hands and bony digits? Did real Tina Turner not have human hands?

This type of scrutiny is what happens when you commission a hyper-realistic monument, says Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, a professor of art and anthropology at UCLA. Flynn explained that because so many people are so familiar and have so many reference points with celebrities like Turner, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lucille Ball, it’s an uphill battle when a sculptor attempts a realistic depiction of their subject. It’s even more difficult when someone’s created a statue of Tina Turner, and the main question people have is whether or not said artist has ever even seen Tina Turner.

“It’s brutal because if it’s one millimeter off, it’s like a straight red card,” Flynn says (referencing the nightmarish Ronaldo bust).

Flynn explained there are various factors that create what he kindly calls “uncanny results.” Making photo-realism the end goal is a strong instigator, mainly because that isn’t what sculptors often seek to do. What critics think of as “good” sculpture is based on capturing the essence of a subject while also playing with depth and positioning — things that are often incompatible with wanting to sculpt a true-to-life model of a person.

“Sometimes the truest portrait, it’s not one that really is trying to be hyper accurate like this,” Flynn says. “If you want that, just go with photography.”

Flynn also notes that while bronze can be a great material for sculpture, “deadline bronze” and putting a time limit on sculpture (e.g., an unveiling date) is where things can start to go wrong. When someone commissions a piece in bronze, the understanding is that the piece will ostensibly live forever. Wouldn’t you want someone to take their time with a piece that will live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years?

Yet, as Flynn explains, there’s a growing immediacy when it comes to honoring people we deem legendary. We want to see people honored before we die, sometimes before they die.

“Before, people had the decency to wait until these people were dead,” Flynn says, pointing out various bronze statues in the sports world.

If a sculptor really wanted to capture the thrill of Tina Turner’s presence, they also probably wouldn’t subject themselves to guidelines, or deadlines from an approval committee, says Mark Tribe, the MFA fine arts chair at the School of Visual Arts.

“There aren’t a lot of contemporary artists who work in that vernacular who would necessarily be interested in making a realistic figurative sculpture of a specific person,” Tribe tells Vox, explaining that there’s a problem on both ends. People and committees commissioning these statues are just looking for something realistic and are choosing from a pool of artists who are willing to relinquish at least a little bit of their artistic freedom.

“You could call it a failure of imagination, a lack of creativity,” Tribe says. “It’s a one-to-one relationship between what you see and what you get, and there’s not a lot of complexity between who is depicted and how they’re depicted.”

The end result is that instead of a conversation about Turner’s enduring legacy or her impact on music or the particular thrill of watching her perform “Proud Mary,” the only thing that anyone wants to talk about when they see this memorial is whether or not this statue looks like her. Theoretically, someone could come in and make a better statue of Tina Turner that’s more flattering, but it would still spur the same, worn-out conversation.

In speaking to experts like Tribe and Flynn about horrendous statues, I quickly understood that I needed to be more precise in tossing around words like “bad” and “horrific.” There’s bad as in: The statue of Tina Turner looks like an ugly version of her. And there is bad as in: The monument was only created for resemblance’s sake (and even then it failed). There didn’t seem to be an attempt at capturing anything about her beyond the superficial.

Doing so would require a risk, a point of view — and possibly making some people uncomfortable.

“If you want to create something and the worst thing people are going to do is roll their eyes and yawn, you make a bronze statue,” Tribe tells me. “There’s a reason why some of the greatest monuments in memorials in recent times are not bronze sculptures.”

Tribe cites the Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by Maya Lin. At the time, Lin’s design — a tear in the earth flanked by two slabs of black marble etched with the names of service members who died or were missing during the war — was controversial because it wasn’t straightforward. It wasn’t an obvious bronze statue of a soldier. (Three bronze soldiers were added to the memorial in 1984 because people were upset.) Yet, Lin’s design, Tribe says, captured the complexity, the loss, and immensity in ways that many of us can now see and appreciate.

Flynn, the UCLA professor, made a similar comparison when citing Auguste Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac.” At the end of the 19th century, the Société des Gens de Lettres commissioned Rodin to create a sculpture to pay homage to novelist Honoré de Balzac. After seven years, Rodin created a sculpture that was more abstract and represented his interpretation of the writer’s work, rather than a literal interpretation of Balzac’s physique.

“It was just this kind of looming presence in a robe. There was nothing recognizable about it, and it wasn’t flattering in any way. Contemporary people at the time, they called it just a sack of plaster,” Flynn says, detailing why the Société des Gens de Lettres absolutely hated it and ultimately rejected the piece — Rodin ended up taking it home. Rodin’s critics wanted a more realistic, more lifelike depiction rather than Rodin’s attempt at capturing Balzac’s genius.

“Now, over a hundred years later, it’s a masterpiece,” Flynn says. Rodin’s model was eventually cast in bronze, many years after he died.

While Rodin, Balzac, and the Vietnam War couldn’t be more different than the Queen of Rock and Roll’s legacy, these debates are all part of the bigger conversation about how we want to remember people and make sure that other people do, too. Should we remind people that these subjects existed — or make bold attempts to show people what they meant to us?

The Tina Turner statue’s fault is rooted in that it’s too lifelike.

The intent to portray the singer’s physical likeness is probably something more along the lines of what the Société des Gens de Lettres wanted from Rodin. They wanted something spectators would recognize, not one artist’s idea of another person’s essence.

Of course, there’s a chance that criticism will flip-flop, like it did with Rodin. Perhaps the misformed Tina Turner statue will be something that people will fawn over in 100-something years. Bronze lasts that long.

But everyone making fun of it, like Turner herself, probably won’t be alive to see it.