The duck, as you may have heard, stands some 25 feet tall. It floats in the harbor off of Belfast, a tiny city midway up the Maine coast and south of Bangor, having apparently appeared bobbing in the water there under cover of darkness.
“Everybody loves it,” Given told the Bangor Daily News. “I have no idea who owns it, but it kind of fits Belfast. A lot of people want to keep it here.”
Given said she isn’t in any hurry to get rid of the surprise visitor.
“If it was in the middle of the mooring field, it could be kind of a navigational hazard,” she said. “Where it’s in the shallow water, it’s not bothering anybody.”
As if to overemphasize the message of happy playfulness its creator clearly aims to project, it has the word “JOY” written in big block letters across its big yellow chest.
Ropes attached to weights appear to be keeping it anchored in place, as gawkers in boats and along the shore stare at it in wonder. No one knows who put it there, and the mystery surrounding its sudden unannounced arrival has quickly been noticed by news outlets across the country.
It is not the first giant rubber duck to float along the coast in cities across the Earth. It will not be the last.
Giant rubber ducks have been making themselves seen since at least the mid-aughts, when an artist named Florentijn Hofman began installing them in waterways on a worldwide tour. He called the project Spreading Joy Around the World.
If he is behind this particular rubber duck in Maine, he would have significantly downsized: His original duck-based work of art stood six stories tall, so big it loomed over skylines wherever it went, making harbors look like bathtubs.
Some people have come to hate these ducks. Art critics sneer at their mass-market appeal and lack of connection to the countless cities that have hosted them, seeing it as a violation of the public artist’s duty to cater pieces to their environments. One guy in Belgium hated that city’s giant rubber duck he stabbed it to death. When another giant duck deflated under suspicious circumstances in Hong Kong, people suspected something similar.
In Taiwan, one of them exploded during an earthquake. Video of the incident is haunting.
Update: The as-yet unidentified group behind the duck has spoken. A press release Belfast Harbormaster Kathy Given sent us this afternoon includes this quote from what she called its “Anonymous Benequackers”:
