The city of New York recently unveiled a grotesque statue of a horned, spaghetti-armed female figure slathered in gaudy gold atop one of its appellate courthouses. The apparent effort to one-up Boston’s new “Embrace” sculpture — which purports to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but resembles feces at best and a male appendage at worst — looks like what you might imagine if the Starbucks logo and Medusa had an unholy merger. Perhaps appropriately, the figure named in tribute to the fight for abortion looks more like a demon than a woman.
A new statue atop a New York City courthouse. The artist says it’s part of an “urgent and necessary cultural reckoning underway as New York reconsiders traditional representations of power in public spaces and recasts civic structures to better reflect 21st-century social mores.” pic.twitter.com/4IFRj7hCsf
— Andrew Beck (@AndrewBeckUSA) January 25, 2023
Conservatives responding to public “art” installations like these will justifiably complain about the annoyance of having to look at such ugliness in parks and on street corners. They may insightfully point out that such acts of rebellion against beauty reflect a cultural disdain for religion and the nature of humanity itself (as Nathan Stone argued well in these pages here). But one thing conservatives rarely do in response — for fiscal reasons or otherwise — is create alternative, better art.
Why not take some of the money Republicans throw at their favorite political consultant firms and divert it to commissioning monuments, sculptures, and even architecture
