Young Australian Charged for Supposedly Attaching Sticker Eyes on ‘Cast in Blue’ Artwork
A young person from the Land Down Under has faced legal proceedings after allegedly defacing a large blue sculpture of a legendary being by applying googly eyes to it.
The 19-year-old, aged 19, participated remotely at the local court in the state of South Australia on Tuesday, charged with a single charge of property damage.
In a statement at the moment of the September incident, the local council said that CCTV footage showed a person placing fake eyes on the sculpture, which locals have dubbed the “Blue Blob”.
The accused did not enter a plea and told the judge she was unwell, according to media sources, with the judge recommending her to find a lawyer before her upcoming hearing in December.
A day after the reported event, the local mayor stated that repairs to the much-loved community sculpture would be costly as the adhesive eyes were impossible to be removed without damaging the sculpture.
“This wilful damage to a cherished community art is unacceptable and disrespectful,” Mayor Lynette Martin said in September. “It is not harmless fun, it is pricey - it is also frustrating to those people of our society who have embraced Cast in Blue.”
The mayor added the council would seek the “significant” repair costs from those accountable for the damage.
When the sculpture was first proposed, it received mixed reactions from the local community due to its cost and design.
Costing 136,000 Australian dollars ($89,000; sixty-eight thousand pounds), the artwork represents a mythical megafauna, with the sculpture’s designers inspired by an prehistoric marsupial ant-eater found in nearby caverns that was “huge, slow-moving, and intriguing”.
