A cybergeography of public art encounter: The case of Rubber Duck

Online uses: reconfiguring spatialities and temporalities

Virtually mediated public art requires a reconfigured understanding of space and time vis-à-vis public art engagement prior to the emergence of digital culture. Social media have substantially affected and digitally intensified quotidian life (Brake, 2014; Hartley, 2012). Although digitally mediated content as such does not carry any spatial-material ‘mass’ for tactile engagement (see Dodge and Kitchin, 2001), it is layered over the material world and people’s ‘real-world’ experiences. As argued by Crang et al. (1999: 1): ‘[digital] technologies are seen as facilitating, if not producing, a qualitatively different human experience of dwelling in the world; new articulations of near and far, present and absent, body and technology, self and environment’.

Where offline public art encounters typically involve multiple in-situ users within single material environments, online and particularly digital mobile public art engagements may involve digital multi-user environments to overlap with multiple material environments (see De Souza e Silva, 2004). Such ‘messiness’ of space in digital culture (Rose, 2015) fundamentally reconfigures the dominant Habermasian notion of the public sphere: contemporary digital culture is spatialised along fluidly dispersed, and potentially invisible, publics (Hartley, 2012). Social relations and identities are, accordingly, expanded and reconfigured by multi-directional technological-digital practices such as uploading, downloading and streaming through desktops, mobile devices and do-it-yourself (DIY) technologies (Hartley, 2012; Kidd, 2014). This fits Jenkins’s (2008) understanding of convergence culture, wherein offline/online engagements and analogue/digital and hardware/software technologies coexist in ‘real life’ and real time, thereby augmenting one another and deconstructing open/closed space divides.

The ‘digitisation of our existence’ (Bishop, 2012: 436) has further blurred public/private and physical/immaterial boundaries, and provided augmented and immersive understandings of public values of cultural objects. Also, it has provided the empowering opportunity for everyday citizens to create content beyond institutionalised spaces, for example, through YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr (Kidd, 2014). This essentially marks the shift from people as passive audiences/visitors/end users towards participatory, self-authoritative, purposive and creative publics (Goriunova, 2013; Kidd, 2014), consequently boosting grassroots agency, collaborative meaning-making and collective intelligence (Hartley, 2012). Hartley (2012) argued that social media in particular (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr) offer fewer limitations to participation and interaction than more conventional media that have been extrapolated into the digital sphere, such as online television.

Digital surfing can involve myriad uses of art: for example, browsing, sharing, creating, editing, and curating or composing first- or second-hand art content, which can be done over, for example, image management and sharing platforms of Flickr and Pinterest (Kidd, 2014). Digitally networked space enhances the affective experience of public art (Gauthier, 2015), as it essentially inscribes publics around the artwork’s appreciation through ekphrasis (discursive commentary) (Rhodes, 2015). This expands Warner’s (2002: 62) definition of publics to the digital: ‘a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. It is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time.’ Rather, as textual and visual elements of user-created content are often digitally amalgamated over digital sites and time, I would prefer to speak of dynamic/moving ‘text-images’ (e.g. emoticons, annotated photos). Rhodes (2015) provides the example of proliferating augmented reality applications for mobile phone users to visually and discursively ‘re-texture’ real-world environments, including public streets and museums (e.g. the Louvre and the Guggenheim). So, after Boellstorff (2008), online activities can inform publics’ expressions and ‘doings’ in the public artwork’s material locality, ⁴ and the other way round – producing temporally dynamic social, spatial, material and digital parameters of public art experience.

Online interactions can occur in a synchronous, real-time manner (e.g. live tweeting, interactive Facebook chats) or in an asynchronous fashion: users can communicate, at different and self-selected times, about public art through, for example, forums, weblogs, social media profiles. After Dodge and Kitchin (2001), digital public art content can instantly emerge and disappear ‘in a click’, denoting an ambiguous status of being permanent, temporary or somewhere in between. For example, a temporary artwork removed from its physical locality might ‘live on’ as entity on the internet or be ‘resurrected’ through a mobile augmented reality application.

New possibilities for engagement

Digitally networked relations can put local and global ‘whole populations’ in contact over vast geographical distances (Hartley, 2012). Publics across the global digital world can be connected around an artwork in a specific material locality (if any at all) and interactions can be particularly intensified on platforms with large communities (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). In comparison to offline interactions, it should be noted that online users sometimes have more substantial control over (dis)closing identity: for example, ‘real’ profile photo vs. avatar on Facebook; active tweeter vs. passive ‘liker’ or ‘silent voyeur’ (see Kidd, 2014). Moreover, although digital participation might be commonplace, it is not necessarily possible everywhere and equal for all people in society, considering the requirements for internet access, digital communication skills/literacy and membership of online accounts (see Brake, 2014).

According to Stevens and Lossau (2015), the making and consumption of public art have traditionally been strongly conditional on authoritative control and the ‘privileged category of engagement’ of sponsors and artists (2015: 7), who impose functions and ‘manipulate audiences so that they will perform what the artwork prescribes’ (2015: 5). They employed the word use to address a power shift to publics, ‘who find their own purposes in the aesthetic objects and experiences presented to them’ (2015: 5). Applying their argument to digital culture, this power shift becomes particularly notable considering online users’ potentially strong possibility to (re)imagine, (re)purpose and (re)occupy spaces through especially social media (which are usually user-friendly and free of charge) (Kidd, 2014; Lodi, 2014).

This grassroots condition of what can be considered ‘post-internet art’ (Gauthier, 2015) has incited a new digital consumer agency and democracy (Hartley, 2012; Jenkins, 2008) that breaks the art world’s conventional artist/audience, expert/novice and authenticity/quality binaries. ‘Amateurs’ have gained digital capital to, for example, crowdsource and produce high-quality content to ‘game’ established media and art world systems (Kidd, 2014). So, digital publics might be considered real self-organising citizens whose content can be appreciated through the ‘digital aesthetics’ of bottom-up/DIY creative (co-)production. This produces novel digital knowledges and senses of digital citizenship and increases the legitimacy of ordinary views and grassroots engagements. This legitimacy, however, is often challenged by authorities’ formal evaluations of ‘expert’ output and ‘measurable’ quality (Kidd, 2014).

Critiques of online engagement

Why and how do publics engage with public art online? Miller (2008) argued that online users, depending on any cultural and linguistic communicative barriers, navigate through individualisation (e.g. personal stories/blogs with little social exchange) and network sociability: social bonding practices to construct and maintain personal digital networks (e.g. Facebook and Instagram accounts). Particularly in the context of network sociability, Hartley (2012) observed upsurges of play and humour, indicating acts of ‘silly citizenship’. These imply whimsical, light e-communications (e.g. sharing ‘cool’/‘fun’ pics and memes), which may subvert elite, seriously informed and adultist rationalities. Despite the light-hearted intent of such communications, Goriunova (2013) deploys an existential critique that reveals the dark matter of light e-communications: in her view, the en masse techno-human subjectification has involved a performance of idiocy revealing ‘the trouble of the current human condition’ (2013: 11).

Miller (2008) voiced a similar nihilistic assessment of much indiscriminate digital communication, which he termed phatic communication – ‘communication without content has taken precedence’ (2008: 398) – moving away from substantial discursive dialogue towards the primary purpose of conveying sociability and maintaining a social network. Miller (2008) associates phatic communication with database principles of endless growth (e.g. constant microblogging on Twitter); obliviousness of informational production/consumption (see Hartley, 2012); prevailing ‘promiscuity’ in network sociality (e.g. ceaselessly adding ‘friends’); the desire to be ‘followed’ on Twitter, Instagram, etc.; and expectations of ongoing ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe and Smoreda, 2005). The latter denotes ‘must have’ feelings of being/staying connected with other online users through internet and mobile devices everywhere and at any time – while there is a coexisting paradox of being present and absent.

Phatic communication might be imposed by the medium itself. Twitter allows 140 characters per tweet only, but social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr do not impose any character limit, although a conditioned code on social networks is to keep messages as short as possible (Kidd, 2014). Particularly the popular platform of Facebook, compared to the prevalent microblogging, text-focused platform of Twitter, offers substantial functional space and visual prominence for network sociality and thus maintaining social relationships (Kidd, 2014).

Online practices can be motivated by, for example, (phatic) indifference and everyday banalities, or emotional attachment and ensuing heated debates, acts of public shaming, and trolling (i.e. posting inflammatory content in discussions over internet) (see Brake, 2014). Amin’s (2002) notion of ‘micropublic’, originally designating offline spaces for intercultural encounter, offers a relevant angle for exploring public art’s social significance. A digital micropublic would, then, entail digitally mediated space, ranging from indifferent/non-judgemental to antagonistic/judgemental atmospheres, wherein publics encounter, exchange, negotiate, bridge, challenge and/or potentially transgress everyday social and cultural values, differences and norms through public artwork (after Bishop, 2012).

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a long curved wall traversing NYC’s Federal Plaza (1981) served as classic example of how public resistance in the real world, as mediated by print media, radio and television, led to the destruction of this public artwork in 1989. The vandalisation of Paul McCarthy’s Tree, a 24m-tall inflatable sculpture resembling a butt plug in Place Vendôme in Paris 2014, demonstrated the power of social media in reciprocally affecting public art online and offline. Gauthier (2015: 29–30) conveyed that the Tree case is a:

noteworthy story of the rejection of a public artwork in a networked age … it revealed rifts in the fabric of the French public … the virtual layer outstripped the physical … the assault transferred from the online to the physical realm …

(The artist was even slapped in his face by an offended onlooker.) The heated debate was accelerated online: Tree became a meme and ludic visual reinterpretations circulated, which challenged heteronormative society and aristocratic architecture. Some even took this work as worthy successor of the Eiffel Tower. Tree is physically no longer in the Place Vendôme, but continues to exist as a conversation piece both in ‘real life’ and online. This example illustrates Tree as creating a digital micropublic, wherein users digitally mediated ‘co-authorship’ of public art and repurposed its roles along reconfigured senses of space and time.

Critical or phatic digital micropublics?

Rubber Duck’s online coverage had accelerated over the project, and Facebook and Twitter in particular were strewn with user-created content. I observed that most of the content was intended to entertain both content-creator and content-consumer. Online promotional materials by Hofman’s studio and local authorities hosting Rubber Duck on their waters emphasised the cultural grandeur of both the artwork and city. User-created content, again and again, particularly played along with the artwork’s flagship allure and sensational spectacles of official unveilings.

A salient illustration was the massively attended and richly online documented entry of Rubber Duck into Keelung, Taiwan. The inflatable became even more virally reported on New Year’s Eve 2013/14 when it ‘exploded’ in front of a large crowd, just 11 days after its installation. Dramatic news reports presented headlines like ‘it’s a Duck meltdown’. ⁵ Online speculative threads about the explosion’s cause reinforced the sensation-seeking spectacle; for example, online users wondered whether this resulted from any technical issues or vandalism. Hofman (interview) refuted any dramatic hearsay and imparted that Rubber Duck was preventively deflated due to an approaching typhoon. Hofman loathed (social) media’s ongoing pursuit of theatrical news value and parroting reporting at moments of ‘crisis’: ‘they hear of something without knowing the origin’, he said.

Rubber Duck’s online coverage repeatedly entailed entertaining narratives characterised by random snapshots as embedded in everyday trivial activities (which bear a strong resemblance to the Tree case). This suggested that the artwork carried meaning, no matter how subtle, in people’s ‘little daily things’. On Studio Florentijn Hofman’s Facebook account, the artist occasionally shared user-created, banal imageries and stories about the work alongside news headlines and official promotional materials. A telling example was a Facebook photo titled Enoying [sic] ice creams. ⁶ This image showed a senior couple eating ice creams in front of the installation, floating on Parramatta River in a public park during Sydney Festival in January 2014. As of 19 March 2014, 965 online users worldwide had clicked this photo’s ‘like’ button, 22 had commented on it and 59 had shared the post. Most of the shares indicated uncommented, fairly facile referrals. These, in their turn, were often liked or commented upon by Facebook friends of the respective users, demonstrating vivid interactions. The comments were largely brief. Rather than environmental references, they stressed ‘people-art’ emotions in the sphere of aesthetics, amusement, sympathy and fun, for example, ‘so cute’, ‘lovely’, ‘enjoying Rubber Duck’, ‘best pic’, ‘enjoyment of innocence and his wife’, ⁷ and ‘who let the duck out?’ ⁸ – an array of narrated interventions that may have been indicators of ‘silly citizenship’ (Hartley, 2012).

I experienced this example as a quite personalised portrait of Rubber Duck. Online sharing appeared to interact between the intimate scale of the digital photograph, the artwork’s material scale, and internet’s global scale. This expanded the artwork’s publicness in a multi-layered way: it showed how something personal had been made accessible to online users anywhere in the physical world. Moreover, the posted photo of Rubber Duck with the ice-cream eating couple can be rendered as a hybrid, ‘more-than-human’ ecology: it interlinked art matter with human corporeality and digitally mediated not only a sense of everydayness but also everywhereness. Ice-cream eating was made a familiar yet extraordinary experience by the artwork’s presence. Through the digital text-image, users could transport themselves mentally into similar simple joys of everyday life, potentially providing vicarious experiences and moments of (virtually distant) interpersonal encounter.

Another salient example of an interactive Facebook thread (combining practices of sharing, visual editing and textual commenting), laid bare a playful yet critical eye for cultural consumer behaviour. In reference to Robert Pirsig’s icon of American cultural-philosophical literature, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, a Facebook user shared one of Hofman’s photographs of Rubber Duck and whimsically annotated: ‘Zen and the art of eating soft serve’. ⁹ Another Facebook user entered into a dialogue and commented: ‘where’s the pitchfork?’, to which the first commenter replied: ‘American Gothic Rubber Duck. I can do that’. This provoked a reaction: he uploaded an edited image of the much-parodied American Gothic (with ‘apologies to Grant Wood’), depicting a yellow duck protruding between the farmer and spinster daughter. The other user amusingly commented: ‘they look like they are about to duck’. The first commenter then wittily replied in reference to what has become de rigeur in social media: ‘duck wants in on the selfie’. This user’s comment can be critically linked to ‘plop art’ (Kwon, 2004): perceived random (and potentially intrusive) sitings of public art around the world – just as some people have come to experience the act of taking selfies as inconsiderately invasive in (public) art spaces. ¹⁰ The latter is also indicative of phatic online communication, where ‘the ephemerality of digital effort is always flickering with the energy of immortalised selfies’ (Freeman and Sheller, 2015: 6).

I consider the two previous examples significant illustrations of Dodge and Kitchin’s (2001) argument on temporality in digital network space. The respective digital posts and associated threads appeared to be offline when I attempted to revisit them as of the time of writing, in June 2015. Philosophically, there is nevertheless ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe and Smoreda, 2005) in that the current post-analysis resuscitates this content in a sense and makes the online users’ encounters present again (albeit in their virtual absence).

Furthermore, I observed that a substantial number of encounters with Rubber Duck over social media lacked any deeper social critique in their discursive and visual semiotic contexts – resonating with Miller’s (2008) theorem of hegemonic phatic e-communication in digital network sociality. The examined engagements seemed to be mostly situated in atmospheres of sensation and echoed everyone-pleasing and consensual art-making, as also insinuated by the artist’s mission statement. Public news debate challenged the artist’s statement, resulting in ample digital footage. For instance, in an online broadcast of the popular Dutch late-night talk show Pauw & Witteman, the interviewer Jeroen Pauw considered Hofman a shrewd entrepreneur who uses Rubber Duck as a popular mass article: ‘if you make something big it will catch the eye, so people find it attractive to have the bath duck floating in their harbour’. ¹¹ Hofman explained he materially scaled up the yellow bath duck to create the feeling of a global, harmonious artwork. ‘The worldly waters have become our bathtub’, Hofman said, and therefore he believed that his artwork reconciles and breaks down all barriers between people. Hofman imparted that some citizens of Pittsburgh petitioned local authorities to prolong the artwork’s presence: ‘people seem to fall in love with it and want to keep it’.

That said, there was online activity about how Rubber Duck was used for geopolitical purposes, which uncovered social and political tensions that might mount around large-scale urban art installations like this one. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan ‘hijacked’ the artwork as figurehead for a presidential election campaign vibrantly played over social media. ‘In Rubber Duck we would have a unique president who could even cross the Taiwan Strait by itself, depending on the prevailing wind’, said a KMT representative. ¹² Hofman (interview) asserted that over social media ‘many lies were going around about alleged high sums that politicians offered in the race to get the bath duck to their location for political profit’. This suggested that city authorities, in China in particular, used Rubber Duck as online plaything to underscore their importance within political hierarchies in ‘real life’. Moreover, China’s authoritarian government and its official control formed a critical motif in some online users’ appropriations of Rubber Duck. Most notably, in 2013, a user of the Chinese microblogging and social networking site Sina Weibo posted a photoshopped version of the ‘Tank Man’ photograph close to the anniversary of the student-led Tiananmen Square protests on 4 June 1989. The edited image featured a column of Rubber Ducks instead of tanks and soon became a meme (with some quirky variants), as in the Tree case. Some highly placed officials engaged with this meme. For example, while the Chinese government censored various words including ‘big yellow duck’ on Sina Weibo, a United States Foreign Service Officer tweeted ‘Chinese netizens 1, Chinese censors 0’. ¹³

Nonetheless, everyday online users’ ‘prosaic’ and ‘banal’ acts (Amin, 2002) primarily set the tone for Rubber Duck’s digital micropublic – rather than sustained dialogues and practices subverting the established order. Mostly by posting, commenting and curating/editing, publics offered other users text-images as digital ‘contact zones’ to react upon (after Askins and Pain, 2011). Unilateral communications and banal interactions typified these micropublics. Examples were legion: ‘if you still do the duck face in pictures I’m judging you’ ¹⁴ represents one of the many one-liners. Snapshots were tweeted of people kissing ¹⁵ and squeezing ¹⁶ Rubber Duck. The depicted poses drew a compelling parallel with tourists’ photo-taking behaviours in offline space (e.g. clichéd snaps of people apparently holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa). The previous snapshots sparked off interaction between online users and Hofman himself – a direct connection that might be unlikely to occur in offline space. Hofman retweeted the snapshots and added to the latter: ‘don’t squish me!’ ¹⁷

Although this small intervention showed, in the vein of Amin (2002), a prosaic dialogue, it revealed interesting banal transgressions at two levels. First, Hofman, by his simple line, discursively incarnated his own artwork in online space. He augmented Rubber Duck’s offline postmodern visual language with a digitally transmitted ironic-textual dimension. Also, despite the artwork’s super-large material scale, Hofman’s irony hinted that Rubber Duck can be ‘cuddled’ online, thus making it more-than-visual and ‘digitally tactile’ within online experience, which contradicts the ‘only-visual’ existence of digital content as implied by Dodge and Kitchin (2001). Second, this example showed how the use of public artwork through social media can lower the threshold for everyday interactions between the artwork’s creator and its audiences. Also, the Twitter thread under discussion might be described as an interactive interpretative panel thrown open to the virtual public at large.

Hofman (interview) moreover indicated that Rubber Duck’s online omnipresence might have made him more approachable as ‘emailing body’, too. His art studio receives and replies to daily fan email. As we spoke, Hofman printed out and discussed an email that he just received from a South Korean schoolgirl. She enclosed her school essay about Rubber Duck and wrote that its ‘cute appearance’ inspired teachers, friends and herself. Hofman pointed that the profuse e-communication about the artwork both revealed and contributed to real-world impacts on people. But it remained largely indistinct to me how social relationships were exactly deepened in digitally networked spaces.

Place-specific or universal?

Rubber Duck’s generic style and touring nature raise questions about the degree to which this public artwork speaks to specific places and publics or rather to global (art) trends and global (digital) markets and audiences. Hofman’s oeuvre resonates with the postmodern aesthetic of determinedly oversized and kitschy artwork by leading contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy (see Tree and the ‘Butt Plug Gnome’; Zebracki, 2012). Some might consequently experience this ‘uncultivated’ aesthetic as disconnected from local architecture and falling short of deliberate dialogue with local publics – see ‘plop art’, which according to Kwon (2004) reflects the globalised art world’s marketed habits/desires, resulting in the ‘commodification and serialisation of places’ (2004: 55). Others might, nevertheless, experience deeper meanings, locational awareness and connectedness with local or global (digital) publics.

I observed an analogy between online engagement with Rubber Duck and its commodification in offline space. The travelling exhibition could, indeed, be considered a serial spatial project propagating homogeneous expectations about its object (enlarged plastic inflatable bath toy), location (urban water and skyline as backdrop), audience (large voyeuristic crowd) and habits (mostly photo-taking and merchandising practices). Digitally mediated images/imaginations reproduced and enhanced these expectations and, as such, amplified non-concrete social identities and space-times.

That said, some place-specific text-images of Rubber Duck were created through mobile devices on the spot (which could be seen as portable digital simulacra of the artwork). Online users occasionally carried over experiences while being among crowds beholding the artwork in situ, channelling feelings of encountering the artwork together. I encountered the content through my computer in my own geographical localities (university campus and home space), situated in places and times different from the exhibitions. The intimate scale of some online materials let me, in some capacity, vicariously co-sense mediated experiences of in-situ onlookers. For example, I gained a relayed experience from my encounter with this tweet: ‘lol @ the giant duck floating around campus’. ¹⁸ The Twitterer accompanied this post with a photograph taken on the artwork’s site in real time. This instance vividly played on my imagination of what it would mean to experience Rubber Duck in my everyday locale (e.g. as intruding, aestheticising, alienating, place matching?).

Amateur entries were often interlinked with professional news narratives. As such, e-communications (a)synchronously linked to other digital places and offline realities, awaking an indeterminate, digitally compressed sense of space-time. Although Miller (2008) identified much social media activity as apathetic and indifferent, its viral potential could monopolise some explicit (positive or negative) attitudes and lend colour to public debates accordingly. Some digital encounters with Rubber Duck were outspoken. CityLab, for example, published a clearly critical op-ed, shared by more than 1,000 social media users:

The Rubber Duck artist must be stopped: the inflatable spectacles of Florentijn Hofman don’t belong in every harbour in the wide world … Rubber Duck sends an infantilising message about the role of public art in cities. ¹⁹

The author applied similar critiques to Hofman’s other travelling installations, including the floating supersized wooden hippo sculpture. Strikingly, content created by both official media and grassroots largely presented various Rubber Duck exhibition spaces as spatially and socially undifferentiated and disassociated. ‘Unique’ environmental elements, beyond the presence of water for the Duck, were not quite fleshed out through artwork properties and complexities. A broadly homogenised online gaze fetishised images of the bath toy and the object’s large-scale stature in lieu of attending to the diversity within publics and what the artwork really does to the couleur locale. Although some online narration indicated place-specific experience, universal place images dominated. A thorough public induction by the exhibition organisers and promoters could have been an opportunity to heighten awareness of this artwork’s potential site specificity (see Kwon, 2004) on the part of both online and offline publics.

Nevertheless, spatial attachments occasionally clearly filtered through user-created content, for example, in the guise of references to other Rubber Duck exhibitions that called up its geographical trajectory. A Facebook thread about the Sydney-based installation included a user’s post of a self-taken, annotated photograph of Rubber Duck in Pittsburgh: ‘thank you [Hofman] for bringing your duck to Pittsburgh. We loved having him here!’ ²⁰ Such gratitude/interest, no matter how trivial, might precisely be the public response that flagship-art marketing strategies aim for, both offline and online.

But sometimes goals were more ambitious. The Netherlands Embassy in Beijing invited Hofman to deliver a press conference as part of 2013 Beijing Design Week as well as Guest City Amsterdam. ²¹ This did not just serve to promote the spatial identity and creative economies of both cities and their respective countries. Many counterfeit goods appeared to circulate, particularly over mainland China, and therefore the Design Week official declared: ‘We want to use the Rubber Duck case to drive an awareness programme raising the sensibility towards intellectual property rights around China.’ ²²

The online incarnation of Rubber Duck suggested an enactment of globalised, commodified values of popular culture. Various offline as well as online pop-up stores mushroomed mainly in the Far East, and especially in South Korea and China, selling all kinds of products, including bath supplies, eco-bags, mugs, beddings, smartphone cases, T-shirts, school supplies and even humidifiers, with slogans such as ‘enjoy the Rubber Duck and get energy from the duck in your daily life!’ (Song, 2014). Such (e-)commerce embedded in an economic culture of imitation might not only mutually reinforce phatic online behaviour (see Miller’s [2008] grander critique of increasing nihilism in western (e-)culture). It might further market/standardise spaces for public art engagement and, thus, cultivate ‘hands-off’ relationships with specific offline places. Hofman, in our conversation, acknowledged being somewhat flattered by the various (counterfeit) pastiches. At the same time, he advanced a critique of neoliberal livelihood strategies: much (online) merchandise of Rubber Duck, especially within the scope of illegal trade culture, just indicates a way to scratch a living by merchants coping with broader, large-scale commercial competition.

Some online commenters criticised the artwork’s dearth of unique spatial quality. In the comments thread of the YouTube tabloid video Florentijn Hofman’s Giant Rubber Duck to Swim to Hong Kong Harbour City, ²³ a user made a plea for an alternative public artwork: ‘hmmmm might have been better if they did giant pink dolphins, the ones that are becoming endangered because of pollution in the Pearl River :o’ (i.e. ‘surprise’ emoticon). In this video, Hofman conveyed that ‘[Rubber Duck] brings back memories of your childhood; and as everyone had a childhood, the Rubber Duck connects everyone’. A critical screening renders this statement as eschewing social differences, which thus challenges the artwork’s ‘publicness’ following Massey and Rose’s (2003) criterion of social relationality. Hofman (interview) pursued a romantic naïveté in an ambiguous way. Although he demonstrated awareness that people could take the artwork as universal/non-place-specific, he indicated its place-specific and supra-spatial/global relevance and potential to stir intercultural curiosity:

I am in duty bound to enter into engagements with the audience.… Rubber Duck laboratises human behaviours.… It is a catalyst: it shows what is going on and makes people around the world interested in new places.

Hofman (interview) imparted that he received a great number of positive testimonials from arts and civil society organisations, as well as individuals who enjoyed Rubber Duck through both analogue and digital communication channels. For example, he received a box of chocolates from the father of an autistic child for whom this artwork seemed to have therapeutic effects. Hofman expressed his belief in how (social) media can be used as effective tool to communicate locally grounded emotional narratives, even if they are ‘just’ about excitement. For instance, in a Facebook announcement of Rubber Duck in Seoul, SBS News World shared:

#FlorentijnHofman, the artist who is known for his famous #RubberDuck sculpture, is posing in front of camera with yellow Rubber Duck. ‘Korea has been through so many sad incidents lately. I wish Rubber Duck spreads joy and happiness to people in Korea’, said Hofman at the press conference today. ²⁴

However, Hofman (interview) stressed that his piece is more than just about ubiquitous pleasure and fun. We should approach this artwork ‘as pedagogical piece.… It can make everyday people proud owners of their environment’, he said. Hofman indicated that online sharing of his mission statement might have made publics more aware of public art’s local relevance, but also of how creative online network practices could make positive global impacts.