Young Australian Charged for Supposedly Attaching Googly Eyes on ‘Cast in Blue’ Artwork
A young person from Australia has appeared in court after reportedly defacing a large blue sculpture of a legendary being by affixing googly eyes to it.
The 19-year-old, aged 19, appeared remotely at the local court in the state of South Australia on that day, facing with one count of property damage.
Officials commented at the moment of the September incident, the municipal authorities explained that surveillance video captured a person putting artificial eyes on the artwork, which locals have nicknamed the “Cast in Blue”.
Ms Vanderhorst made no plea and informed the court she was ill, as reported by news outlets, with the judge advising her to secure a lawyer before her next court date in the final month of the year.
The following day the reported event, the local mayor said that repairs to the much-loved community sculpture would be expensive as the stickers could not be removed without harming the sculpture.
“This wilful damage to a valued public artwork is unacceptable and disrespectful,” Mayor Lynette Martin remarked in mid-September. “It is not innocent amusement, it is pricey - it is also frustrating to those people of our society who have embraced the Blue Blob.”
The mayor said the local government would seek the “significant” repair costs from those accountable for the vandalism.
When the artwork was first proposed, it drew mixed reactions from the local community due to its price tag and design.
Priced at A$136,000 (eighty-nine thousand US dollars; sixty-eight thousand pounds), the sculpture depicts a legendary giant animal, with the sculpture’s designers influenced by an prehistoric marsupial ant-eater discovered in local caves that was “huge, slow-moving, and intriguing”.
