Tina Turner was simply the best. Some say she was better than all the rest. The same cannot be said for a newly revealed bronze statue honoring the incredible life and career of one of the greatest singers and entertainers in American music history.Unveiled in Brownsville, Tennessee, the 10-foot-tall statue, situated across from Turner’s former high school, looks like Cousin It from The Addams Family sitting on top of the face of a woman sitting in a fighter jet going Mach 4.New Tina Turner statue unveiled over the weekend here in Tennessee. Words fail. Great art does that, leaves you speechless. So does an abomination like this.Might have to stop and see it next time I'm near Memphis. Pictures can't possibly do it justice. pic.twitter.com/TNzSzqM3cP— slimzim (@jameszimmermann) September 29, 2025It looks like Grimace is slowly eating the Crypt Keeper from the head down. She looked like a player-created video game character that was purposely made to be scary.But it’s not just her.A year ago, we saw Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade get his own statue that looks like a ghost screaming out from the great beyond. Dwayne Wade’s statue has been unveiled and he does not look happy about it pic.twitter.com/1CG9bGHaJj— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) October 28, 2024Back in 2018, we all had a nice laugh when Portugal’s Madeira airport unveiled a statue of modern-day soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo that didn’t so much look like the obscenely handsome international sports star as it looked like Sloth from The Goonies if he had been frozen in Carbonite. A statue of Cristiano Ronaldo was unveiled at Madeira airport.It's had mixed reviews https://t.co/ssRyI231ae pic.twitter.com/6OeVlXlDQ3— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) March 29, 2017In 2016, a bronze statue erected in the hometown of comedy legend Lucille Ball had to be replaced with a much more accurate one after the original sculptor made Lucille Ball look like a fusion of Clint Howard and Richard Nixon.I’ll see your Tina Turner statue and raise you the Lucille Ball one pic.twitter.com/5P23LEpFnV— ✭Marc✭ (@wrongstanceprod) October 1, 2025There are several other examples out there of people trying to honor some local hero’s greatness with a statue that looks like the totem of a folkloric beast on which villagers drape the entrails of their enemies to keep the beast sated so it doesn’t eat their children.This is an established pattern now. A meme, but not in the “low-effort Facebook image that’s slowly turning your aunts and uncles into fascists by way of lo-res pictures of Minions” kind of way. In the original Richard Dawkins sense of an idea that seems to naturally spread throughout society, popping up in disparate regions seemingly at the same time, almost inexplicably.These are cultural titans. Icons who shaped entire generations. And the best way we can honor them is apparently by making them look like trickster demons who want to grant you wishes that will definitely backfire.What’s odd is that some of the sculptors have a great track record of creating beautiful statues. The guy who made Dwyane Wade scream in agony for eternity has made some beautiful sculptures. Fred Ajanogha, the sculptor behind the Tina Turner statue, has a long track record of creating gorgeous life-size and larger-than-life statues, some of them of real people. His Harriet Tubman statue at the Harriet Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia, looks like Tubman herself is standing in the middle of the gallery. It’s uncanny.For some reason, bronze sculpture artists cannot get their skills to translate over into pop culture figures. We are rapidly approaching the point where so many of these statues are going up while looking less like earnest tributes and more as if the person’s excruciating pain was forever captured as they were doused in molten bronze. We may need to consider putting an indefinite freeze on all future celebrity bronze statues till we can figure out what the hell is going on. Maybe we need to ask ourselves if the bronze statue is even the best way to honor our heroes anymore.Surely there’s someone out there with a big 3D printer who can whip up a giant action figure version of a local sports hero. If I can print little figures of orcs and dwarves at home for my D&D campaigns, someone out there can definitely scale it up to a statue that doesn’t look like a hometown hero had gazed into the eyes of Medusa.Have we not been properly funding the arts? Have we funneled too many budding sculptors into STEM and dead-end office jobs, and now every city and small town in America that dares to honor a local who made something of themselves is condemned to having that person’s golem haunt the city for centuries to come?I don’t claim to have answers. I just have the same questions and concerns that you do, fellow citizen. The closest I have to an answer is this: we need to put an immediate stop to all celebrity bronze statue projects until one sculptor somewhere in the United States proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can replicate a face.The post Maybe We Should Retire the Celebrity Bronze Statue appeared first on VICE.