Bust of Lincoln Destroyed

[ysabetwordsmith]

So this happened. 

The same principle behind this leads to this and this.

I told you so.  I have been saying and saying that when a society starts pulling down statues, it tends to mushroom, because people get it in their heads they can destroy all the art they dislike.  Sure it's tempting.  Everybody loves to pull down something they hate and stomp on it.  That's very gratifying.  But it's a bad idea because it destroys the past and then nobody has nice things for a long time.  It also sucks when other people pull down stuff that YOU like just because THEY don't, and there is probably not one piece of art on the planet which is liked by everyone.  

Seriously, people, stop doing this shit.  Unpopular art can be moved to a place where it won't annoy folks, but destroying it is counter-civilization.

Comments

[serpentine]

The problem with those statues is not that they are history, but that a lot of them were put up in order to distort history and to popularize the idea of the Lost Cause.

[starfallhaven]

Myep. They were cheaply made and mass-produced and distributed during the era of Jim Crow. They're not even historical or particularly artistic.

[capri0mni]

They were cheaply made and mass-produced and distributed during the era of Jim Crow.

Just so.

And this infographic, originally published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows a majority of them were put up on courthouse grounds -- a clear reminder to those people whose families were formerly enslaved who it was who still had power over them.

Can a statue really be considered "art" if it was created with the intent to cause psychological pain to one specific group of marginalized people?

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Just so. <<

The statues I've seen have had a wider age range and quality range.

Where I've seen lower quality and detail is chiefly in memorial statues -- there were companies that would sell fairly generic "unknown soldier" ones to put in cemeteries. The best way to deal with those is probably just pop a locked crypt over them.

>>And this infographic, originally published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows a majority of them were put up on courthouse grounds -- a clear reminder to those people whose families were formerly enslaved who it was who still had power over them.<<

Huh. Not where I've seen the majority, but I'm in Illinois and have seen the South primarily on vacations. Plenty of statues in parks and street dividers and in front of museums, but I haven't done a lot of courthouse sightseeing.

>>Can a statue really be considered "art" if it was created with the intent to cause psychological pain to one specific group of marginalized people?<<

Yes. People draw cartoons of Mohammed to annoy Muslims. It's still art. It's just being used in malicious ways. Most of the really BIG works of the world were made to make someone else feel small. Art is defined by what it is, not how it's displayed.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That too is either history, or current events, depending on how far you feel race relations have evolved in this country. I wish it were far enough in the past that people no longer got upset over it, but we're not there yet. Hence my efforts to promote diversity, because I don't think that removing statues is going to fix underlying problems.