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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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What upsets me is that it feels like the artist got halfway through doing an amazing sculpture and someone came in and said "What are you doing? If you keep going like that it's going to look fantastic - cut it out with the good sculpting already!" so he just stopped and shipped it as is.

The unfinished part is referring back to Michelangelo's sculptures, so they are trying to do reference to "heroic classical sculpture", so I can forgive them for the unfinished look, the image arising part-way out of the stone.

The statue itself is not bad, if a little too reminiscent of Chinese Communist style, but it could be a lot worse. So for public art that is a memorial to a heroic figure, it gets a pass from me.

Have you been in person? The memorial as a whole just works in a way that isn't apparent in pictures. The white stone conjures up images of Mount Rushmore, subtly asking the viewer, "what would a modern Mount Rushmore look like?" but without taking on the virulent anti-imperialist tone all too prevalent in other artworks of the genre.

My ex said something similar when we saw it. Maybe I'm too enamoured with the image of the finished sculpture I have in my head.