Re: Monumental Mistake

These statues are art, and art is never about one thing - not if it's art. Street signs and highway billboards use some of the tools of the artist, but no one would mistake them for art, unless you are a cultural didacterist like Andy Warhol or a philistine like all Social Justice Warriors.

'These statues are celebrating slavery,' cries the SJW as she stares with lidless eyes at a motionless object. Like the good, modern Kantian that she is, all she can see is what the petrified categories of her mind filter and form, locking her into a miasma of self creation.

But art is about the noumena, the things behind the things, the things that we can only see 'through a glass, darkly,' the reality that shows itself obscurely, by the dancing light of fire on a cave wall.

Art is what SJW's want the Constitution to be, a living, breathing organism, adapting in the flux of Darwinian time to challenges unforeseen by the Founders. But the Constitution is not art; it is political prose with a specific logic, and logic is sub specie aeternitatis. It cannot morph with the times any more than a bird can fly underwater - take the fixed meaning of the Constitution out of eternity and dunk it in temporality and it will die as surely as that wayward bird.

But art does live and breath and morph with the changing times, because a particular work of art is in a dialogue with time and space and each and every person who encounters it. And not only the work of art, but the person too can morph thru the encounter, and that in turn can alter the reality of the artistic vision.

Back and forth, forth and back again, art & spectator dance in a mutual journey thru time, ever in motion. This is what makes art multivalent. A meaning might flourish like marigolds in sunlight for a while, and then whither and droop under the shade of a mighty oak of significance that was merely an acorn when the artist set to work. And as meanings shift, we shift in turn, striving to pierce the flux to the eternity behind.

Here is what Brian T. Allen had  to say about the matter:

[This painting's] history as a made object gives us a contested surface that changes much as our ideas about race change. The painting isn’t static, and neither is history. Ligon’s canvas was a used one. He covered an old painting with a layer of black paint and then painted his picture. As history teaches us, some things just disappear.

To conclude, it is a curious (perhaps malicious) myopia that insists on seeing these works of art through a single shallow category of slavery. Slavery has long since been rejected by the South, and whatever the intent ab initio, these statues now remind of nobler ideals. To name a few: history as a continuum of past, present, & future; the remembrance of forebears; the instantiation in time of a unique American community & culture; and perhaps most important, the honor and bravery of the soldiers' sacrifice. To confront these  statues is to open oneself to the opportunity to learn these important truths - and perhaps more beside.

That is, for those with eyes willing to see. For the rest, leave them to their mindless virtue signaling, for they truly know not what they do.