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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Why Boston’s “Embrace Statue” has led me to embrace Western chauvinism

Boston Common is a beautiful park in America’s true historic city. It’s a must see when visiting, and features a number of old monuments. There’s the Soldiers and Sailors monument, the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, and a memorial to the Boston Massacre. All of these are in a beautiful timeless design that the common man appreciates, which is appropriate for the common park of Boston. I wouldn’t say these monuments compare to achievements in European cities, but they are nevertheless noble attempts to celebrate the glories of the nation. As in all great art, the form befits the content, and the statues artfully imitate the gravity of their depicted scene.

Boston liberals decided to plop down a new monument, called “Embrace”, in dedication of MLK Jr — a figure mired in controversy over his support and instructions on raping women and the evidence that he plagiarized both his PhD thesis and his famous dream speech. (If that sentence was strange to read, it’s because I’m trying a new writing style where I introduce progressive heroes like they introduce mine). But the reason I disagree with the statue isn’t because MLK is a cheat or a misogynistic rape-enabler. Were the statue beautiful and heroic, and adequately conveyed the perseverance and dedication and cultural significance of MLK, this post wouldn’t be written. But that didn’t happen. Instead the statue looks like shit.

I mean this literally: it looks like a gigantic turd. The real world angles (not the architectural projections) make it look like a man firmly gripping monumental dung [1]. Some go further, and say it looks like a man gripping a monumental dong — that Boston has erected nothing short of an erection [2] [3] [4]. Surely the view of the common people should take primacy for the statues of the Boston Common, and Twitter is filled with normal people laughing hysterically at this statue.

So why erect something so ugly? The root cause here is the conscious betrayal of the Western legacy. What we see in the Boston Common is what we saw in Obama’s official portrait, with many questioning the artist’s choice of a casual background and hiding semen in his work [5]. The Western legacy and its hundreds of years of artistic development, which made a science out of beautiful monuments, is seen as intrinsically white — which is intrinsically bad. And so the novelty of experimental artists is privileged over the traditional and beautiful forms of art. Many of these artists make bad and gaudy work. The public knows this, but they are chosen anyway by the powers that be, who notoriously have an undeveloped sense of beauty.

And so I embrace western chauvinism. The West is the best, not in all the ways, but in important ones. Their statuary history is surely the best. Because the West is the best, we should privilege the traditional modes of art. Accepting this fact would make the public beautiful again.

This is only tangentially related, but this reminds me of a comment on reddit the other day about how public art is often divorced from a practical purpose, meaning that ultimate finished product is bizarre and unsettling even if it is executed well.

Wow. Holy shit. That is horrible, perverse. Also brilliant. It's like that scene in strange days where the murderer puts on a telepathic device so the victim can see her own murder from his perspective.

The artist went on the subway, found it depressing, and now the grey ants have to look at themselves through his disgusted eyes. You could go one deeper. Paint what it feels like to go on this subway on a rainy day to a job you hate, thinking of jumping onto the tracks, when you see this piece, a tainted mirror reflecting and amplifying your pain, put there by the sinister entity that rules over you. And you know the entity approves of and watches your despair, yet it is not motivated by cruelty or sadism, for it too could never feel joy, it merely searches for an aesthetic, endlessly.

You're gonna need more black paint.

Thanks for linking, this case is especially atrocious.

I really agree with this comment and I agree also with some extra

I get more of an “all aboard! Next stop: Auschwitz!” vibe.

(...)

It's awful. I can't imagine being a visitor to Toronto and being greeted with this. Like an out-of-place Holocaust Memorial.

(...)

I stand here in the same clothes I wore yesterday, 38 years old, waiting for the same train I take every single day to my minimum wage job. Every aspect of my life is falling apart. I can barely afford my rent. The grocery store is stealing my retirement. And i'm at the edge of a mental breakdown.

But here I am. Facing a wall of depression that is my literal being, funded by own tax dollars. A very interesting piece of "art" indeed.

(...)

This art makes you want to succumb to the dangerously narrow passages near the tracks. We should start a petition to get it taken down. No art at all would be an improvement over this frosted glass suicide note

(...)

That's the subway station most inhabited by tourists. This is what we think represents Toronto. Depression. Death.

(...)

It's so ugly, so depressing, and even with the vaguest of linework, it still manages to be notably misogynist. The most detailed figure is a teenaged girl dancing around a pole, and she's further dehumanized by having her body outlined more sharply than anyone else's, but her face hidden, AND a yucky guy leering at her - who may be racialized as Black, just to be even more offensive. I despise everything about this.

(while last one is matching claims that are usually false here it mostly matches my own initial impression)

most detailed figure is a teenaged girl dancing around a pole

The "art" is awful, but she's clearly holding on to a train pole rather than dancing on a stripper pole.

Yes, but I admit that it was one of my immediate thoughts. Maybe because it was depressing and pole is without any context? And in my areas public transport poles are not standalone in the middle but more bundled with other parts of the vehicle?

Wow, those are...not inspiring.

I do think the pole is a subway handrail, for what little that's worth.

Yes, but I admit that it was one of my immediate thoughts. Maybe because it was depressing and pole is without any context? And in my areas public transport poles are not standalone in the middle but more bundled with other parts of the vehicle?

Did you mean to write the same comment twice?

I wanted to respond to both people. Should I respond to one of them and hope that other will coincidentally see the other reply?

You can tag the other commenter @traveller

They'll get a ping and it kind of consolidates the thread.

The standard workaround that I've seen is to use a username reference ("@‌ToaKraka") for a second or third person. Reddit silently disables username alerts if you attempt to use too many username references in a single comment, and I assume that this software has a similar limitation.

(Obligatory reminder that imageboard software doesn't have this problem, and allows conversation threads to merge as well as to branch.)

Thanks, I was unaware of that!

@FiveHourMarathon

Somewhat amusingly the section highlighted by the original poster might not even be the worst part. Some other nightmarish panels:

1 2 3

I thought the people were overselling it given the OP, it looks drab and depressing but nowhere near these schizo looking things.

It feels like the environment was designed by people who actively hate those who have to be in it or something.

What the hell.

There's a wider selection, and an explanation, from the artist's website:

On the track side, while you think you can see the entire expanse of the mural, and the train track gives you some mandatory distance from its glass panels, you are often less than 12’ away from an artwork which is over 500’ long. Walking the full length of the terminal, the work is visible only in the intervals between the arrival and departure of trains. At rush-hours, this is less than every 5 minutes.

This time-bracketed viewing of the artwork, as well as its intimate contemplation of our contemporary urban human condition, mirrors and channels the structure and meaning of Charles Dickens composed epic novels, made in intimate sections for his daily 19th century newspaper readership.

Although the project is conceived as a whole (this work has the overall sweep of an entire city block and can be seen as a continuously unfolding ribbon), the title zones of immersion implies that seeing the work close up is a both a necessity and an affordance, allowing a charged intimacy in this public space – a pathos rarely available in public art.

The expression of psyche in public space can give public art a purpose greater than spectacle or decoration. This work presents the unvarnished witnessing of our human dwelling – which speaks of our collective separateness. (I feel a kinship here with Daumier’s Third Class Carriage, and Henry Moore’s wartime subway drawings). The unwritten code of the subway gaze, which says ‘look down/look away’, is challenged as we see ourselves in the work, through drawings and reflections. This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse.

And in a certain sense, it's definitely not wrong: "pathos", "separateness" and "urban condition" are definitely things expressed very well in the 'art', to the extent that many critics of urbanism could point to it pretty precisely as an example.

((Uh, though the 'poem' is schlock.))

It's just no one seemed to stop to consider whether that was the right goal.

It would look better if they just had the coloured panels and scrapped the (bad) charcoal drawings of "let us remind you why you hate travelling on public transport, because it reminds you that you are just a faceless cog in the economic machinery forced into a routine like a rat in a cage".

There is no sense of beauty anymore. And yet people want beauty, as the comments from ordinary people show.

Normal people have a strong sense of beauty. Unfortunately sociopaths have figured out how to get themselves into positions of power and we’re ruled by people who largely don’t give a shit about their job and have no sense of responsibility.

I meant from a purely aesthetic standpoint it's extremely strong, people are definitely getting an artistic experience out of this, it's not some forgettable triviality. But I'm not sure I'd consider breaking people's spirits like this a wise or ethical use of the power of art.

I miss art déco.

Yeah I can easily see someone like me (but with money) picking that piece. Particularly with modern art, where so much is about the interpretation, it is easy to get lost in your own perspective or too focused on one or two concepts to the exclusion of everything else. It wouldn't even occur to me how miserable it would be to see every day until it was installed, I'd be too busy jerking the author off over the irony of it all.

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