It is with wax figures as with confidence: they come on foot and go on horseback. There is at least a year between the moment when Annemiek Dolfin, head of marketing at Madame Tussauds, plays with the idea of immortalizing a new Dutch celebrity for the first time and the moment when the image is actually unveiled – months of consultation, audience surveys and posing sessions. But when singer Marco Borsato was accused of transgressive behavior on a Thursday during the broadcast of Angryhis wax figure was already gone on Friday.
In fact, they were never that receptive to outside pressure at Madame Tussauds. After all, in the cancel culture, discussions often behave like fireworks: a lot of fuss, a lot of noise, but also quickly extinguished. For example, the image of Michael Jackson is again taken as many selfies as for that 2019 documentary in which he was accused of pedophilia. Moreover, at the museum in Amsterdam, they believe that the public should decide who is exhibited in the galleries, not the missionaries of good decency.
But Dolfin, who leads the team that decides which statues will go where in the museum, notices that the statue storm that has been raging across the world in recent years is now also blowing into wax museums through all sorts of nooks and crannies. “It’s gotten worse in the last two years, especially,” she says.
The harvest of recent months: Donald Trump who disappeared from the collection of an American wax museum, because it was continuously scratched and punched. The eye of Vladimir Putin expressed in a Roman museum. The same Putin who was preemptively culled in Paris. And of course Marco Borsato and rapper Lil ‘Kleine, who both had to leave the field in Amsterdam.
Those are unpleasant moments, says Dolfin. You don’t want to move too quickly with the times. Also because a wax figure costs about two hundred thousand euros to make, so there is a budget for only six new statues per year. At the same time, the museum does not want to risk becoming the subject of a media storm itself. ‘We had to react quickly, especially with Marco’, says Dolfin. ‘We then said to each other: guys, we’re putting it on temporary maintenance.’
Your reporter of this piece (hello, I never properly introduced myself in this place. I’m Jarl van der Ploeg, until recently I was an Italy correspondent and I am allowed to write this column in the coming months) knows from his previous position that the cancellation of statues is something of all times. In ancient Rome, after the deaths of hated emperors like Nero, a damnatio memoriae was pronounced, a curse of memory, meaning that their names were erased from the archives and their statues had to be removed from their pedestals.
An even more illustrious storm of statues took place after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, when the assembled lords of cardinals decided that depicted nudity was henceforth against good Catholic morals, after which all sculpted genitalia had to be replaced by fig leaves. Tradition has it that somewhere deep in the depths of the Vatican City, there is still a chest jam-packed with castrated cocks made of Carrara marble.
I think of that coffin when I ask Dolfin what the euphemistic ‘in maintenance’ by Marco Borsato means and she replies that wax figures are rarely destroyed, but after removal from the museum they are almost standardly taken to a shed where the bodies are stored in body bags and the heads and hands, which are very vulnerable, are put in boxes.
That means that somewhere in the Netherlands there is a room full of boxes in which the heads of Lil ‘Kleine, Ali and Marco B. are currently waiting for rehabilitation, a comeback or a second chance. A purgatory of cancel culture, if you will, in the middle of the country.
It must be great to poke around in that filing cabinet of bygone fame, that graveyard of past glory, whose location Madame Tussauds sadly keeps a secret, because world stars would rather not have their disembodied heads photographed by journalists from de Volkskrant†
The room is filled with heads of celebrities who are no longer interesting enough for an increasingly international audience, such as Epke Zonderland, Jan Peter Balkenende, Pim Fortuyn, Jim, Jamai and Michiel de Ruyter. Unfortunately, Hugo de Groot is not in a coffin – which is a missed opportunity – any more than Mark Rutte, says Dolfin, because he never gave permission for a wax figure to be made.
Perhaps that was a genius move by the almost longest-serving prime minister of the Netherlands. After all, never immortalized has never been cancelled.