Most of the time, American public sculpture didactically screams a few tone-deaf notes.

"We can afford sculpture!"

"We are soooo refined!"

"We are willing to offend all the barbarians!"

"Our artist is smarter than you!"

This so-called art generally lacks the expression of the refined skill of the artisan and the aesthetic appeal familiar from the classics, as well as the message and community function of the older public art.

We still honor individuals - but we do it differently; inscriptions, for example, persist. The rare examples of public art that honors people tend to do so through inscription, not depiction. We don't associate ourselves with these individuals - Adm. Nelson stands on his plinth in part to highlight his eternal membership in the community of Britain - they are proud of him, proud that he is one of them - but tombstones, including the lists at the vietnam memorial, put distance between the name and the community - we mourn the absence rather than celebrate the belonging.

As for ideals, like Winged Victory or Justice, or Mercy, we are no longer willing to claim their discomfiting presence in our midst. That would give too much potential credit to our internal foes. Some installations suggest that these luminaries have fled the community altogether, as the artist pretends to be, to represent, and to speak for, outsiders who are protesting the decadent community formed by his foes - and so his sculpture is meant to be ugly and offend, a great raised finger facing the people he believes drove away glory and greatness.

In short, sometimes the ruin brought on public spaces by the artist (like that wall from the slide show) is intentional, not a bad shot at beauty, but truly meant to offend, put there by people who believe they are better than the community, and not really part of it.

Beauty is often meant to be whimsy or sarcasm, and is often temporary... but one must acknowledge that it occasionally crops up in unexpected installations.

Why would we not be better returning to a somewhat more hagiographic style, in which we praise and honor through heroic depiction, people and virtues we desire, rather than filling our gaze and focus with (and spending our money on) things that are ugly, abhorrent, the product of self-righteous imagined superiority by those who think they are our betters?

Why would we not be better returning to a somewhat more hagiographic style, in which we praise and honor through heroic depiction, people and virtues we desire, rather than filling our gaze and focus with (and spending our money on) things that are ugly, abhorrent, the product of self-righteous imagined superiority by those who think they are our betters?

I'm not sure I agree with your implicit assumption that public art which addresses community problems is necessarily ugly, abhorrent, or the product of self-righteous superiority. I, for one, think the Vietnam War Memorial is quite beautiful and utterly devoid of self-righteousness.

However, I agree that most art today, not just public art, is not as interested in conventional ideals of beauty as in the past.

Yes, I actually like that memorial physically, and the womens' table at Yale is pleasant too.

Actually, springing from that table, many fountains are quite lovely even if they are rather stark sheets of relatively unadorned marble, simply because running water and flowing water and jets of water are all so beautiful, themselves. A reflecting pool is pretty hard to mess up.

Art can address public issues while being hagiographic and beautiful - a passable case which I don't like too much, but which fits reasonably well, is the mural of women who were brought down prematurely by breast cancer, done in Harvard Square. It represents these women as a cluster of goddesses, roughly speaking. I think it could be done better, but the idea is not to do something wretched like represent a giant tumor; instead, it brings virtues into focus by presenting people in their best light - public art, aiming at beauty, discussing a public problem.

Nelson is a proud member of the British community? You ever been anywhere? London isn't the whole of the British community you twit. You loon.

"We praise and honor ... people and virtues we desire." In your case that would be Jeff Davis, Stonewall Jackson, the Dick's Nixon and Cheney, and maybe Almad Chibali.

"Self righteous?" That's you. Imagined superiority? That's you. Who are those better than you? Nobody you've ever mentioned.

Although it is probably pointless to reply to such nonsense, I would like to say that I have found Lord Nelson widely admired by Canadians, Australians, Scots, Welsh and Brits from every part of England. I'm not sure where you get the idea that he was some sort of failure; also, I wonder why you think I am personally superior to Stonewall Jackson. Interesting value judgment.

Ben, you're playing games with the only one not to agree with you. And there's so much with which to disagree. You like the Vietnam Veteran's memorial -- but WHICH ONE? From the tone and substance of your top post, I'd guess that you would prefer the bronze of three soldiers that Ross Perot paid for and foisted on the memorial with a phony VietVet organization that he pungled up- for the occasion. But you say you like maya Lin's memorial, though it's not uplifting the way your nicely phallic Nelson Memorial is.

When i look around the public memorials recently constructed in and around Dee Cee, I am struck not so much by the playful, soulless Modernity of them, as much as the made-by-committee dumbness of them. And the vast majority, when they include "sculpture," stick to the figurative crap that you seem to prefer. Since you don't specify, i won't either. Oh hell, the FDR memorial and the World War Two Outdoor Bathroom, to name two.

If you want to know what's REALLY wrong with public art commissions nowadays, it's that after disasters like the Tilted Arc fiasco, so much is invested in butt-coverage that it's a miracle that so much public art is of such high quality and charm. Consider, for instance, public work in NYC by Sarah Sze, Anish Kapoor and Dennis Oppenheim. That's great stuff. So what are you whining about?

You want some naked woman waving a sword around? Does that symbolize some higher ideal for you? If you wonder why there's such a shortage of that kind of thing, remember Attorney General Ashcroft's decision to remove the sculpture of Justice from view because of her Wardrobe Malfunction. His kind of prissiness is by no means unusual these days. A Winged Victory would be refused by any committee without a death wish as excessively sexuaal and provocative for taxpayer-subvened public art, and if you want to blame someone for that you have to look to the reactionary tools on your side of the fence.

art is art, neither good nor bad, its what YOU like, not someone else, nor can anyone claim to KNOW what is good or bad...some people like brussel sprouts, some like corn.....to each their own...

I think you are missing most of the sculpture that raises my ire. I live in Boston, where any bit of sheet-metal or a few I beams, a rock, a block, a chunk of bronze, gets enshrined as public sculpture.

The good stuff is the old stuff here, it seems. The statue to the discovery of ether and anesthesia in the public gardens, for instance. Or the statues to Washington, Sumner, the veteran of the Spanish American War, John Harvard, 'this Puritan,' etc. There are plenty of interesting statues; even the one to conquering hunger is interesting.

You are right, modern committees of soulless morons generally lead to the selection of talentless sculptors and pointless blemishes on the cityscape. I don't know the mall that well, but I can't imagining liking most of the newer offerings. I do like Iwo Jima, as well as the major memorials (Jefferson, Lincoln). You can chant 'phallic' all you like, but if a group wants to put someone 'on a pedestal' there is nothing like a good pedestal to do the trick, and the whole 'phallic' argument, while perhaps amusing for about 20 seconds in the 60s, now reeks of 2nd grade potty humor masquerading as an ideology.

In the end, I wasn't a huge fan of Ashcroft's conservative PC-ness; I value the grand statues that consecrate parks (like East Rock in New Haven). I just can't stand the tasteless offerings like the big face on Science Hill or the windmill near the president's office, which manages to disgrace the otherwise somber, and occasionally nude, formalism of the commons.

Some of the old stuff is good, much of it is not. Those committees are not made up of soulless morons. For your sins, you should find yourself serving on one of those committees, with the mind-altering directives under which they labor.

You don't sound really open to nonobjective art, public or private. Are you open to regarding that as a matter ofpersonal taste, not fact?

And while you might get bored or something with the whole "phallic" business, that doesn't mean it ever goes away. I'm bored with racism, and it does not go away, either. i am bored beyond reason with George Bush. A public schlong is a public schlong. That doesn't make it good or bad, but it probalbly makes it patriarchical. maybe the Dad thing doesn't bore you, just its identification with its indexical organ. if so, tough shit.

the Lincoln statue is great, as is the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, but great statues of dead presidents and great bronze war memorials are about as rare as great Baptist ministers. Martin Luther King Junior was the central hero of my youth, and in his memory I have cut an awful lot of slack for an awful lot of awful people. How many lousy men on horseback are you willing to approve because of the Marcus Aurelius statue? And by the way, you should take a close look at the Jefferson and Iwo Jima statchoos some day, and you will likely change your tune about them. They are precisely the kind of boring crap of which a committee of soulless morons would approve.

I'm very open to non-objective art. However, conceptual art is useful to express a concept, and then it no longer needs to be repeated ... ad nauseum. The Fountain was clever once, and only once. Moving away from conceptual art, there is room for non-objective art as well, but if it is going to be non-objective, it needs to be startlingly beautiful, nonetheless. Crappy non-objective art is particularly crappy.

There is in fact tons of non-objective art that I do like, and in a sense almost all art is 'public' if it is displayed for the non-creator, non-owner population to view it.

Oh, and on the phallic thing: uninventive people who want to denigrate things that are otherwise unassailable point to the fact that they have more length than breadth in some dimension and consider it sufficient opprobrium to eliminate any suggestion of virtue in other aspects of the object. That is stupid, and you are guilty. Sometimes a pillar is the best way to place something in the public view without having to build, say, a pyramid; similarly, white is generally a color of purity/light and black a color of evil/darkness. Further attempts to paint everyone who uses these sensible
signs a racist need not be continued. Even the liberals are abandoning political correctness as that ship goes down. Do you want to be the last one aboard?

So you are bored with criticism of the white=good, black=evil meme, and you tie it to poliltical correctness, which you figger is out of date and fashion. As above, tough shit. We were brought up in a time of institutional racism, and have sentimental ties to aspects of that culture. You don't want to let go of those ties because, well, you invested in them as a kid and it seems so darned unfair that you have to discard them now. Once again, that's tough. I feel your pain. But drop the fantasy that you've somehow survived the need to reform your ideas. The flirtation with academic conservatism is itself drawing to a close with the failed Bush administration. It was a nice time for the Podwhoretzes of the academy, but it's over.

I remember when I was a kid, reading Whitehead's short book on symbolism. In the preface he made particular note of the Washington Memorial, which he'd ust seen for the first time. It had, apparently, been a moving experience to see Alexander's needle writ very, very large. It was, according to Alfred, a symbol of purity because, you see, it's white. No mention of the phallus thing. That was the golden age to which you long to return -- in which our national lingam could be discussed, in terms of its symbolism, without a single reference to the erect male member. Dream on.

To what conceptual sculpture do you refer? If something has driven you to nausea, surely you can remember the name of the artist and the work? If you're going to slag people, you should do it intelligently, especially since you so enjoy wearing your brains, if not your heart, on your sleeve. Nice image, that.

For bonus points, name a couple of nonobjective pieces of public art that you find startlingly beautiful. And nothing by Calder or Moore please. I got tired of reactionary wattle-shakers throwing Calder at me as their lone fave modernist decades and decades ago -- long before you began cringing in the presence of the politically correct.

Hardly for me to chase the white whale, but you can keep phlinging phalli at unobtainable objects if you want.

La Tour Eiffel is beautiful without being a humanoid, animal or landscape. Not exactly conceptual, but hey. I actually like some of the color-field Rothkos; and I'm something of a fan of mr. ceci n'est pas une pipe; Magritte. The hydraulophone and the chimes in T-Kendall are excellent examples of interactive multi-media public sculpture.

As for nausea, its easy to find and hard to remember. I can quickly name Mark DiSuervo - notably Aesop's Fables II and Lichtenstein's Modern Head, Iron Man by Gormley. The first two are so shockingly ugly that their only major achievement is to ruin the surrounding landscape.

The timeless observation of Freud that even he didn't dare reduce everything to a couple sexual symbols should stand as a warning to those simpletons who believe that symbol is entirely social construct, and further, who attempt to hijack the public space with oft-repeated, vain and empty accusations based on some bizarre notion that the 'patriarchy' can and should be overthrown, and that this will be achieved by eliminating all things tall and long from the public space; or replacing them with things round and/or hollow; further, that racial harmony will have been achieved when people can no longer speak of good, evil and shades of grey, but instead have either inverted their color values or are completely blinded - probably by some big, shiny, soulless sculptures reflecting the sun.

I'm not disagreeing with you just to be disagreeable, much as you seem to think so. You enjoy calling people morons and simpletons. Well, some of the time so do I, but you overreach here, especially in your last paragraph, your big finish of frothy run-on non-sentences.

Nobody proposes to remove all things big and tall from the public space, sphere or whatever. Speaking strictly for myself, I don't see the point of WORSHIPPING them, is all.

And of COURSE symbols are social constructs. Just because they are sometimes long-lived constructs doesn't mean they're eternal verities. Where do you think aesthetic values come from, anyway? Do they drop from the skies?

Finally, I like Mark Di Suvero's work, quite a lot. I've seen a lot of it, and there is very little that he's ever done that doesn't make me happy the way your seashells-and-balloons aestetic would have all public art make everybody. Apparently it doesn't work for you, but at best for you, that just cancels my vote out in the great democracy of culture.

You and Ole Stonewall, El Carnicero de Ciuidad de Estados Unidos de Mexico, current fave of right wing religious freak outs as one of the world's finest upstanding moral men, supporters of all things traditionalist, gradualist, elitist and Tory.

The Brits you talk to would live where? In the countryside? At Balmoral? At Scone? Most British folks, some of the best educated in the world, have long since disowned their imperial past, including straw manlike Nelson. Go to a pub or a chip shop or a factory, ask about Lord Nelson. Wait, wait, Nelson a Tory, oh my, my, my.

Nelson's accomplishments: promoted from the rank of ordinary seaman by his uncle, Uncle Suckling, (a legacy admittance to the admiralty, that's the way to go. Say, is that how you got into the Ivy League, nothing to be ashamed of, of course. Eventually he was appointed (do I need to point out the ironies?) to command for his heroism against the great world power, Nicaragua (sounds like one of your favorites, a Bush who sends his military against what look like heathen weak sisters--how's that W thing you were so big on a few years ago workin out?), generally beat up on all things inferior to the English, meaning Hispanic, in the Caribbean, pirated American ships (probably murdered a few Yanks), was an adulterer and illegitimate parent, (I'm pretty sure you've condemned that kind of thing when sec-uh-lur-ists do it) and a supporter of mutiny on the high seas. So no, Nelson wasn't even a big favorite in his own time. The credit given to him should have gone to all the soldiers and sailors who sacrificed to win at Trafalgar, not one, hand (little pun there) picked Tory "hero." But that's your elitist point isn't it? Give credit and grand historical significance to one big brave man (always a man, eh? You approve of any public art about women?) That's the kind of public art you love, art that commemorates garbage history or half assed superstition: you'd like to see those Ten Commandments up on every court house wall I know. How about we put up statues of Charles Lyell? By Darwin, you'll get something right someday. Law of averages old chap. What we find out when we search beneath the patina of uber morality is confusion and ignorance. I understand why you don't reply.

Well, this was a very decent and reasonable response; I admit to an excess of rhetorical fury in reaction to some of the prior posts. I still think a bunch of your prior arguments were poor at best and more likely simply vacuous.

I don't propose to worship the statues; however, I cannot agree with your general statement about aesthetics being a social construct, nor the related idea that virtue is a social construct. That set of arguments is played out. It had its day, accepted for the ends it appeared to bring into sight, rather than for its value as a means, and for its apparently revolutionary vigor without reference to accuracy. Now it has been discredited and we can all move on.

I think this will eventually prove to be one enduring disagreement that we will return to over and over, that it seems to me that the world of arguments you inhabit is passed; while in its ascendancy it was oppressive and manipulative and exceedingly powerful; and some people still live under its thrall, just as during its time, some people still lived in a modernist/positivist world, and some people in the medieval scholastic world, and the pagan world that preceded that. Hopefully we will meet again on the other side of derrida and foucault, where freud and woolf are just echoes of specters.