High art or high kitsch?

The imminent arrival of Ginés Serrán's monumental sculptures at the Port of Malaga has sparked more than just a local debate; it has triggered a full-blown cultural skirmish that has now reached the pages of The Times.

The British broadsheet couldn't resist the hook: eight-metre-tall bronze deities that look suspiciously like characters from a DC blockbuster. But beneath the surface-level comparisons to Jason Momoa's Aquaman lies a deeper, more perennial Spanish conflict: the clash between popular public art and the gatekeepers of "High Culture".

The San Telmo Royal Academy of Fine Arts wasted no time in branding the project "kitsch", "pretentious" and "grandiloquent". Their critique - that the statues belong more to the "Marvel Universe" than to a sincere recovery of classicism - is the quintessential battle cry of the art-world snob. It suggests that if a work of art is too accessible, too muscular or too "Hollywood", it must be inherently devoid of merit.

This brand of snobbery is a familiar ghost in the Spanish art world. There is a deeply ingrained belief among certain academic circles that public space is a sacred museum where only the abstract, the conceptually dense or the "institutionally approved" should reside. When Serrán - an artist who boasts of commercial success and 1,500 works sold across 60 countries - offers a gift to the city, the elite recoil. To them, his international "curriculum" is "strange" simply because it exists outside the narrow circuit of subsidised galleries and state-sanctioned biennials.

Is the Neptune statue lovely? That is, of course, subjective. But it is undeniably striking. It features a bronze fishing net plated in 24-carat gold - a technical feat the artist claims has never been achieved before. It is designed to be an icon, a "photo-op" and a celebration of Malaga's Phoenician and Roman roots.

The irony is that by dismissing the work as "superhero art", the academy has inadvertently highlighted why the public might actually love it. In an age when contemporary art often feels cold and exclusionary, there is something refreshingly democratic about a giant, golden-netted god of the sea. If the statues look like superheroes, perhaps it's because superheroes are our modern mythology.

By forcing the city to reduce a 25-year loan to a mere six-month "trial", the critics may have won the first round. But as the story goes viral in the international press, the "Marvel Neptune" is already achieving exactly what the academics feared most: it is becoming a landmark that people actually want to see.