Monumentally Kitsch

Abstract The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and global reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 reorientated activists, the media, and scholars worldwide toward the meanings associated with colonial statutory. In Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia, this reorientation coincided with the 250th anniversary of navigator Captain James Cook’s first Pacific voyage. The number of Cook monuments in these settler-colonial nations evinces that Cook is an historical figure with an outsized legacy. This article examines the histories and fates of two particularly unusual Cook statues, one in Tūranga (Gisborne), Aotearoa, and one in Cairns, Australia. Amid so many Cook monuments, why have these two statues alone been taken down? This article argues that statues celebrating colonial figures can be seen as falling within the genre of kitsch, but that these two statues are extreme examples of kitsch aesthetics. Their obvious embodiment of kitsch and provocation of mirth in viewers proved pivotal in the decommissioning of these antipodean statues in 2019 and 2022. The fates of the statues called “Crook Cook” and “Nazi Captain Cook” analyzed in this article indicate that the aesthetics of colonial statues can be as significant a factor in their removal as the historical behavior of their subjects.