Exclusive First Look: When Marc Quinn Made Kate Moss Into a Monument

We all remember a time when Kate Moss didn’t speak. Or rather, she presumably spoke—ordered coffee, called her mates, complained about flight attendants—but to the public Kate Moss was entirely silent. Kate was a billboard, a magazine cover, a paparazzi flash. She was wordlessly everywhere, omnipresent, never complaining, never explaining.

It’s difficult now to remember quite how powerful that silence was. Fame today comes with an obligation to narrate itself. Celebrities post their breakfasts, their skincare, their holidays and their Notes-app apologies. They issue statements before anyone’s bothered to ask the question. We know what people are thinking because they tell us, often several times before lunch. In the mid-2000s, Kate Moss was the last of a generation of celebrities who could be simultaneously ubiquitous and unknowable. The less Kate said, the more there was to say about her.

Human beings have always had an extraordinary talent for turning images into objects of belief. We carved deities from stone, cast them in bronze, gilded saints that shimmered in candlelight. We’ve painted monarchs larger than life and projected movie stars 30 feet high. Every civilization invents an image that carries its aspirations. The technology changes while the instinct remains.

Before Marc Quinn began making Siren, he’d spent years sculpting bodies historically excluded from the classical tradition. The corpus culminated in Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), a subversive break from the “statues of dead blokes who conquered the world,” publicly showcasing a disabled woman. Having considered bodies society did not traditionally idealize, Quinn then asked himself the opposite question: If society could agree on one perfect body, whose would it be? The answer, in 2006, was embarrassingly obvious: Kate Moss. It feels almost quaint now, the idea that an entire culture could more or less agree on one woman.

The pose itself refuses to settle into portraiture. It isn’t the Kate Moss from a Calvin Klein campaign or a paparazzi photograph. It’s often misunderstood as being a sexual image, but it hovers somewhere between yoga—a practice of people trying to connect their insides and outsides—devotion, and impossible elegance. It isn’t trying to capture Kate Moss’s body. By the time Quinn sculpted Kate, the image had already detached. That’s perhaps the strangest thing about images: we imagine they’re fixed, when really they’re collaborative. It is the audience that gives meaning to an image. Every generation remakes its icons by projecting something new onto them, which is why Siren feels more contemporary now than it did in 2008.

Quinn’s distinction between person and image, once an occupational hazard of extraordinary fame, has become an ordinary feature of ordinary life. We all have an image now, the difference being one of scale. We curate ourselves. We edit ourselves. We perform ourselves. We produce tiny public versions of ourselves that wander around the internet collecting other people’s projections. Rather than end image worship, the internet franchised it, which makes Siren feel unexpectedly prophetic. It captures the last moment when a culture could concentrate its collective imagination on one woman before that imagination fractured into billions of smaller mirrors.

Gold was the only material Siren could have been made from; it is precious because we agree it is. Gods are gods because we agree they are. Images become icons because we agree to see more than a person. For a moment, Kate Moss was one of those images. By then, she scarcely needed to speak. Siren is what collective belief looks like when it hardens into gold.