UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

The (island) Oracle lives on two islands, Siesta Key in Sarasota, Florida, most of the year, and much of the summer in Nantucket, Massachusetts. This statue by J. Seward Johnson (a descendent of the Johnson and Johnson Johnsons) stands on Sarasota's bayfront. the artist spends much of his time in Nantucket and made major contributions to the Art Association there. This is quite a coincidence. FROM WIKIPEDIA....

• Unconditional Surrender (a series with several versions begun in 2005), a spokesperson for Johnson has stated that this series is based on a photograph that is in the public-domain, Kissing the War Goodbye, by Victor Jorgensen, however, the Jorgensen photographic image does not extend low enough to include the lower legs and shoes of the subjects, revealed in Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph, V–J day in Times Square, that are represented identically in the statue. A spokesperson for Life has called it a copyright infringement of the latter image. Nonetheless, the first version, a bronze statue of life-size, was placed on temporary exhibition during the 2005 anniversary of V-J Day at the Times Square Information Center near where the original photographs were taken in Manhattan.

Several slightly differing twenty-five-foot-versions have been constructed in styrofoam and aluminum with little detail, painted, and put on display by Johnson in San Diego, California, Key West, Florida, Snug Harbor in New York, and Sarasota, Florida. Their immensity has drawn crowds of viewers at each site although the view of them from nearby is severely limited, essentially allowing a vista of the legs and up the skirt. The statues are described as kitsch by an art critic.