Since 2021, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick in Los Angeles have been planning an exhibition which seeks to re-interpret works of American history as totems of shame. The Monuments exhibition set for this October, could showcase amazing Beaux Arts sculptures removed from their original locations. Instead, it will feature some paint-splashed monuments, replacing great works of art with political statements.
Removing sculptures and shipping them across state lines both endangers artworks and violates a curator’s proper care as outlined in A Bill of Rights for Works of Art. The museums will include contemporary artists with derogatory themes, also debasing Southern history.
The museums’ mocking of certain Confederate sculptures by displaying them with graffiti or paint is reminiscent in spirit to the 1937 exhibition of artistic works labeled “Degenerate” by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. Goebbels publicly ridiculed and demonized modern art and artists. In this case, the opposite is true. Many historical works, admired for generations, will be displayed fallen from their literal pedestals.
By exhibiting desecrated (euphemistically called “decommissioned”) works, the curators privilege small numbers of protesters over the majority opinion who value the statues remaining in place. Further, the Brick and MOCA seem to tar anyone who believes that Confederate monuments represent funerary commemorations or fine art. The exhibition’s curators crave significance, yet lash out against those who don’t agree with their rhetoric. Museum text touts recent monument removals as a “historic moment,” marking the “evolution of the Confederate monument” from its “roots in a funerary impulse” to its rise as a “crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology.” Funerary art is charged with “obstinacy,” “against calls for civil rights.” With such audacity, the exhibition will serve to stir up racial hatred. And, contrary to their claim of “robust scholarship,” the curators are off to an inaccurate start.
This exhibit sees statues erected during Reconstruction and after as “white supremacist,” but those sculptures can still have a commemorative aspect, listing regiments and names of the dead. During Reconstruction, veterans were dying out; families honored them. In 1907 the largest Confederate veteran reunion took place in Richmond for just that reason. Likewise, in Washington D.C., General George McClellan’s statue joined several already-completed Lincoln monuments. Impoverished Southern economies prevented widespread commemoration until the 1890s.
Ironically, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a modern organization (with assets of over $5 billion) that vilifies the South, has for years labeled funerary Southern art as Jim Crow symbols of white supremacy because of the time period in which the statues appeared. Correlation of time does not prove causation. The SPLC omits the fact that money is needed to pay for memorials. They ignore the fact that Northern cities erected many classically-inspired memorials, and fail to explain how only the South’s statues are white supremacist.
At a recent NYU round-table, called De-commission, Seth Levi, chief program policy advisor at the SPLC, admitted that two-thirds of the public wants Confederate statues to remain standing. He said that is because they don’t know the Civil War was about slavery. Levi smeared mourners, claiming if anyone wants to commemorate those who fought to defend slavery, then they’re white supremacists.
Levi’s organization is actively lobbying mayors and city officials to remove 2,000 Confederate statues and rename streets. Levi admitted the SPLC has been accused of erasing history but disagrees with the accusation. By removing public statues, the SPLC is also curtailing conversations about local history.
The Civil War was our nation’s most defining moment after the American Revolution, with nearly 800,000 dead. It reordered the nation’s structure from one of sovereign states to a united nation.
