The Art That We Keep Or Destroy

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘: HERE.

The Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has called for the removal of a mural of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee whose brutal murder was caught on video, because, according to Mayor Smiley, because of its “misguided, isolating intent”.

Providence has a BLM street mural covering three blocks and a “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” mural, but Mayor Smiley urged supporting artists “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us” and remembering Irina’s murder divides us.

Unlike BLM and “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” which bring us together.

In New York City, a mural of the murdered woman was vandalized after being up for less than two weeks. In Chicago, it was vandalized in less than a month.

But not all murals and acts of iconoclasm are created equally or treated equally.

Over in Milwaukee, a 74-year-old rabbi was sentenced for vandalizing a terrorist mural depicting the Star-of-David as a swastika. According to media reports, the Muslim ‘artist’ had to be removed from the courtroom after he “acknowledged his support for Hamas”.

People have gone to prison for driving over street BLM and LGBTQ murals while radical mobs have become heroes for tearing down Civil War statues and Columbus monuments. Write “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” outside Planned Parenthood and you will be arrested, but scrawl “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” and you’ll get a grant. The two-tier culture war politicisation applies to our monuments and murals.

In D.C., ‘preservationists’ have expressed outrage and fought legal battles with the Trump administration over the White House State Ballroom, Eisenhower Office Building, and the Kennedy Center renovations. The latest such lawsuit comes from a coalition that includes the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, the DC Preservation League and Cultural Heritage Partners who are complaining that the ugly seventies modernist mausoleum is “an iconic architectural treasure” whose structures “carry cultural and symbolic significance far beyond the nation’s capital.”

Where were these ‘preservationists’ when radical mobs were tearing down statues and monuments over a century old? They were cheering them on.

The National Trust not only backed taking down Confederate monuments, but actually cheered on the vandalism of the statue of Francis Scott Key, the writer of the poem that became America’s national anthem, while falsely claiming that the lines of the full poem, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave/And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” were racist. Any actual historian knows that this was a reference to mercenaries and ‘impressed’ sailors, forced to serve, a major cause of the conflict.

Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm, previously bragged that “we proudly represent clients who seek to have monuments removed from public lands, relocated, or recontextualized in order to be able to tell fully truthful history and create a more inclusive future.” Cultural Heritage Destruction Partners might be more accurate.

The DC Preservation League announced that it was “committed to the struggle for racial justice” by which it meant that “while some monuments are longstanding elements of historic landscapes or exemplify the work of master artists and craft persons, they may reinforce past values and ideologies which are repugnant today, and their continuing display in public spaces may be unacceptable.” Examples of monuments it opposed included the statue of Andrew Jackson and the Emancipation Memorial, known as the original Lincoln Memorial, showing President Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave.

According to the very selective preservationists, the Kennedy Center, dating back to the seventies, is a national treasure, but an 1876 statue of Lincoln ending slavery isn’t.

The monuments and the murals that are kept and those being destroyed have nothing to do with art, historicity or a respect for the past, only a culture war being fought for the future. This culture war flies the false flags of “inclusivity” with the vandals claiming that they are out to preserve inclusive art, as Mayor Smiley put it, those “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us”, but it’s not about bringing us closer together.

The two-tier enforcement of public art is like everything else about the triumph of a cultural narrative. Much like the ancient pharaohs and caesars of old who vandalized old monuments to make way for the new, their idea of art is all about power. That their preferences end up upholding concrete ugliness, like the Kennedy Center, over classic statuary, is a symptom, and not an unintentional one, of the aesthetics of their politics.

Art is memory and they would rather that we remember George Floyd as an innocent victim of the police, rather than as a violent thug who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, and they would rather that we not remember Iryna Zarutska or innocent crime victims at all. Columbus, Washington and Jefferson must go, but these days so must the statues of Cesar Chavez, because the power to erase the past is also the power to control the culture. Regular cultural cleansings, justified or not, put the ‘party’ in control of collective memory, constantly deciding what gets to stay and what must be purged.

The art that truly moves us isn’t political, but art has become infected with power.

Art talks to us about love, heroism and beauty. It asks us what we love and what we want to be. But in this Orwellian culture, everything, especially culture, is reducible to power. Art becomes ugliness. A means of bullying the public with the party’s repetitive slogans. History is constantly being warped by an ideology that constructs new narratives on top of the old. Art used to be inspiring: it’s now depressing. A radical movement incapable of celebrating anything except its own ideology has seized control of our culture. It doesn’t make art, all it does is make ideological idolatry.

And the right of the iconoclast, the monopoly on cultural violence, it reserves for itself.