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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.
From another point of view looks like he is between pair of thighs and munching like it is his last meal ...
https://twitter.com/AmakaUbakaTV/status/1614002232180998145
Look it is the public fault. In democracy what happens in the public square is eventually the voters responsibility.
That's called the 'Populist Delusion' and there's a good book written about it. You can buy the book, pirate it if you're poor, and there's a video presentation on why blaming the voters is wrong here.
It cover elite theory, the modern managerial regime, how it operates and it makes it clear 'voters' do not really have a say and literally can't have unless they decide to become borderline criminal. And mere public ugliness doesn't jolt the normie as much as perverts trying to mess with their kids, which led to FBI investigating school board revolts.
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It reminds me of the mangled messes of limbs and flesh that Stable Diffusion occasionally generates when it's trying to draw people.
It can't be a Stable Diffusion image, it doesn't have ((((large breasts))))
So far, apart from WW3 the best new development of the twenties. I see that in five years time, photorealistic impossibly beautiful generated e-thots animated by sophisticated LLMs are going to drive all women that are online offline back into technophobic patriarchal submission through sheer looks-mogging and thus civilization may end up being saved by pure horny accident by self-aware geeks trying to make false idols to simp for.
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I must say this statue is a masterpiece in demonstrating just how many different ways a single sculpture can be seen as absolutely, totally inappropriate, while at the core being perfectly SFW. If that was the intent of the designers then bravo to them.
Sculpture, being in three dimensions, is always prone to "I intended the work to be seen from this angle but people can walk around it and see it from different angles" problem. See this video about how Rodin's "The Kiss" has different emphases depending on the angle you view it from.
Unless you have something that is placed in a specific positioning where it will only be seen from the front, you are going to have unintended views. Good artists take this into account. I can't speak for the artist or artists who cast this statue. This is a flaw of conceptual art: they had an idea which they wanted to work out, but they didn't or couldn't see past the idea to what it would look like in reality.
Why they couldn't have gone with a conventional life-size statue or pair of statues of MLK and his wife I don't know, it would have attracted less comment of this kind (to me, it doesn't look like a turd or a penis from the angles shown, but it does look like a pair of arms grappling with a pillow or a sausage). That's why I say the concept (embrace meant to include all the ideas of inclusion and equality and welcome and support and so on) over-rode the practicalities.
Tbf, the statue's 'correct' viewing angle probably reflects direct reference from a famous photo of MLK and his wife, modified by the limitations of the material and the designer's skills; it is meant to be a pair of arms grappling at the shoulder. And if you've rejected the theory of the Great Man (although I disagree), it's not entirely nonsensical to emphasize the famous moment.
It's just... famous in a sense that very few people would recognize without huge amounts of prodding, even if they knew a lot about the time period in question, executed poorly.
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Right, but (didn't watch the video but have seen "The Kiss" IRL) pretty much all of these emphases reflect different facets of the artist's vision for the piece -- this is why Rodin's work is worth zillions of dollars and whoever built this thing has to flog his stuff to mindkilled city councilors. (unless his vision involved MLK holding big pieces of poo, I guess)
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For better or for worse, that isn't really true of a representative democracy. You can vote out someone that does something stupid. You can, if there is such a candidate, vote for a candidate who promises to undo the stupid thing. But for any given issue, there's no guarantee that candidates for office will even realize that $issue is something the voters care about and want to change. In many elections you simply will not have the option to weigh in on a given issue by using your vote.
It never cease to amaze me how little we expect from politicians and state employees compared to CEOs ... if only there was fiduciary duty for poilticians ...
I think there are a couple factors, or at least I can think of a couple which make a difference. One is that politicians are selected by the general public, which is not always wise to put it mildly. Anyone who has worked in a customer facing job can tell you how foolish the raw unfiltered public can be. And those people are picking our leaders too.
Second thing is that as you get to positions representing more people, they get more and more out of touch with those people. A mayor in a small city can have a decent idea what people want from him because there aren't as many voices to listen to. A mayor of a big city has a much harder time, and so on. When you get to an office like the president of the US, there's simply no way any human could listen to all his constituents and follow what they want. Businesses have the same problem too, but they aren't as big as governments (generally) so it's not as pronounced.
Finally there's a coordination problem in how you deal with it, which makes things tough. If your CEO is fucking up, the board of directors replaces him. That is a pretty small group compared to even a small city, which will have hundreds or thousands of voting adults you need to convince to get rid of a politician. That makes it a lot harder to hold them accountable, of course.
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