The Milan city council has extended the display of a controversial new sculpture by Italy's most famous living artist, Maurizio Cattelan. The sculpture, officially titled L.O.V.E. but popularly known as The Middle Finger. will now remain in the Piazza d'Affari outside the Milan stock exchange until the end of a retrospective of Cattelan's work in the city on October 24. Cattelan's latest creation is a huge hand, beautifully sculpted from Carrara marble, the same material used by Michelangelo and Bernini. But its middle finger is extended skywards in a very un-Renaissance-like gesture of contempt. That, given its position here just a stone's throw from the stock exchange, has invited discussion of a possible anti-capitalist message, though the artist himself has denied any such intention. Admirers of the artist's work are pressing for the piazza to become its permanent home, while others have described it as "disgusting," and "an insult to centuries of Italian art". Among those who do want to keep it in Milan is the chairman of the city's culture committee, Massimiliano Finazzer Flory. He would like it to stay put until the end of next year, when it could move to a permanent home in Milan's new museum of modern art. That has raised the question of who would pay. Maurizio Cattelan doesn't come cheap: his best-known work, featuring the late Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, pictured above, fetched a cool $3m the last time it came under the auctioneer's hammer.
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