Allyship or stunt? Marc Quinn’s BLM statue divides art world

Marc Quinn’s statue of a Black Lives Matter protester has divided opinion in the art world with critics calling it a “an opportunistic stunt”, while Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo said it showed “initiative” and “active allyship”.

The artwork was installed in a “secret mission” on to the plinth which had housed a statue of slave trader Edward Colston until it was torn down and rolled into Bristol harbour during BLM protests in June.

Related: 'Hope flows through her': artist Marc Quinn on replacing Colston with a Black Lives Matter statue

Thomas J Price, who has been commissioned to create a sculpture dedicated to the Windrush Generation, accused Quinn of creating a “votive statue to appropriation”.

“Unfortunately, it feels like an opportunistic stunt,” Price told the Guardian. “I think it would be far more useful if white artists confronted ‘whiteness’ as opposed to using the lack of black representation in art to find relevance for themselves.”

Price added that he understood the positive responses to the piece, which was modelled on the figure of Jen Reid who was photographed protesting on top of the empty plinth, but he believed Quinn’s work ultimately failed.

“I can understand the initial positive reactions of those looking to address the lack of visible diversity within public sculpture and gestures towards allyship, but in my opinion Quinn has literally created the votive statue to appropriation.”

Evaristo said she admired Quinn for “constructing this amazing statue in collaboration with Jen Reid, funding it himself, and then installing it in the quiet early hours before he could be stopped”, and in so doing addressing the lack of public statues of black women in the UK.

“It’s a demonstrable commitment to the cause of Black Lives Matter in that it shows active allyship. Isn’t this what we need? Allies?” she said.

“It’s also a personal initiative and not a publicly-funded piece of art. For now, at least, we have another statue of a black woman on the streets of Britain. I expect there are less than handful in the whole country”

Dan Hicks, a professor of archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum who has written about the removal of Colston, said Quinn had shown the “pace and process” that UK communities require “if they are to transform the places they love, while keeping change in step with their values and wishes in this new fast-moving civil rights period”.

He said: “Who knows how long this statue will remain? For many that’s not the point – the value of this intervention is to underline the growing momentum and urgency that’s building around re-making as well as unmaking British cities’ heritage, museums, and historic built environments as anti-racist places.”

The mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, tweeted that the people of the city will decide the plinth’s future, and that, although he understands “people want expression”, the statue was put up without permission and will have to be removed.

Price said he feels the Quinn piece could “overshadow any permanent sculpture”, and therefore hinder “real progress during a moment of activism that should have showcased a black artist’s output, not that of a white cis man”.