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The latest supposed outrage causing convulsions amongst the MAGA set is a 12-foot tall bronze statue of an ordinary, if overweight, black woman that’s been put on display in Times Square for a month.
The sculptor, Thomas J Price (or someone speaking for him), explained in a statement that he chose to depict an anonymous (and fictionalized) woman of color instead of, say, some famous white dude because this “disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.” And he gave her a bit of an attitude as well, saying that “both her stature and her unbothered gaze are markers of status and authority; this is a figure who understands her worth.”
Apparently, some people don’t like having their traditional, er, ideas disrupted. On X, a horde of newly minted art critics, sent into a frenzy by posts from such notable figures as End Wokeness and Libs of Tik Tok, expressed their righteous fury. If you look very closely, you might notice just a slight hint of racism in some of the postings.
Huh. Apparently “sheb**n,” a vile term especially popular with white supremacists, isn’t considered a slur on X these days.
Other posters seemed madder that the woman in question was fat (like literally three quarters of adults in the US, including, you know, me, and probably more than a few of the posters on X). Lord knows that there have never been any other sculptures of fat women ever in the history of art.
Hmm. I guess that last post there had something to do with race as well as weight.
Meanwhile, some other posters saw the statue as a threat to the continued existence of Western civilization, such as it is.
And some of them managed to throw in weight-related jabs and “talking to the manager” jokes as well.
Then there was this guy:
Ok, then!
There are so many more of these but I’m just going to leave it at that.
Now, this is hardly the first time that people have lost their shit over art. When the artists we now know as the impressionists first exhibited their work en masse in 1863, critics were beside themselves over this weird, messy new kind of art, with one wag coining the term “impressionist” as an insult. When Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art show in 1917, critics were furious, regarding the whole thing as a vulgar joke. When Andres Serrano put a plastic crucifix in a jar of urine and took a picture of it in 1987, Senator Jesse Helms declared that he didn’t even think of the photo as art. “I don’t even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist,” he went on. “I think he was a jerk.” Off the floor of the Senate, I’m sure he called Serrano far worse things. Certainly other people did.
But while these reactions to then-challenging art were ultimately misguided, they were at least understandable. The impressionists were fundamentally transforming the way art portrays the world and challenging the public to start looking at things the way they did. (Now pretty much everyone simply regards these paintings as pretty.)
Duchamp intended his art as a provocation. Not only was he introducing a urinal to the world of high art, but he didn’t even make it himself; he bought it at, I guess, a urinal store, flipped it on its side, and called it “fountain,” upending the fundamentals of how art is made and blazing a path for generations of conceptual artists in the future.
As for Serrano’s Piss Christ, well, though Serrano said he meant the photo as a commentary “about what we’ve done to religion” it’s not hard to understand why many Christians were offended to see their Lord and Savior dipped in wee.
But Price’s statue is only offensive if you think that the only people who deserve public statues are famous and/or “heroic,” relatively thin, and preferably white. Like, you know, confederate generals. The main lines of “critique” of Price’s “Grounded in the Stars” is that it depicts:
- A possibly “sassy” black woman
- A fat woman apparently comfortable in her own skin
- A non-famous person
- ???
- PROFIT!
The conservative media, for its part, didn’t offer a critique of the statue that was much more sophisticated than this. Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire sniffed that the statue “appears to [represent] a slightly to moderately overweight black woman wearing jeans that are too tight for her, wearing a T-shirt that she apparently got at Walmart, and staring angrily at the cashier at CVS.” Daily Wire podcast blabber Matt Walsh complained on X that “they tear down statues of American heroes and replace them with statues of random obese black women.” On Fox News radio, Tomi Lahren sneered that “the woke mob is so obsessed with race and so soaked with blatant hatred of white people, it’s now erecting black woman statues to ‘fix racism.’ Let’s see how that one goes!”
The Western Journal mocked the statue for allegedly looking like “a fake-bronze plastic statue that resulted from hooking a ChatGPT-enabled laptop up to a 3D printer and entering the prompt ‘Create a bored person in line at Target.’” Revolver News described the woman in the statue as a “a blob in yoga pants with attitude,” asking
So this is how they imagine a woman’s stance now? Slouched shoulders, dead eyes, overweight, and simmering with quiet rage? This isn’t a celebration of femininity. It’s a warning sign. The statue looks less like a tribute to strength and more like a Karen caught mid-meltdown, ready to demand a manager or lecture a barista over oat milk.
Meanwhile, some site called Outkick took up this same tired “manager” trope, kvetching that
the wokes decided it was time for the Times Square white men to give up some of their turf to a big black woman who wants to speak to a manager NOW.
But my favorite, er, critique of the sculpture comes in a vaguely hysterical–well, testerical– screed posted by author John Daniel Davidson on The Federalist. Davidson, a senior editor at the comically reactionary website, sees the statue not as art but as a form of “cultural warfare” waged by “the cultural parasites of the left” against all that is good and true. The whole thing is worth reading, trust me, but these excerpts will give you some of the flavor.
Outraged that the statue depicts “a random black woman” Davidson thunders:
Having torn down beautiful statues of American heroes and icons, the left is now erecting intentionally ugly statues designed to attack the very idea of greatness and undermine the notion that exceptional people should be memorialized and honored in public. And they’re doing it for the ultimate purpose of seizing and wielding cultural and political power.
Damn, those lefties are sneaky! Statue warfare!
These people do not come to build but to destroy, and what they erect in the place of what they have destroyed isn’t just boring and narcissistic, it’s also cultural propaganda that insists on a neo-Marxist paradigm pitting the supposedly marginalized and oppressed against the oppressors. And we all know who the oppressors are.
Spoken like a dedicated member of the oppressor class.
By putting a statue of a random black woman at ground level, the message, at least on one level, is clear: Do not aspire to greatness, do not honor those who achieve objectively great things. What undergirds this message is a diabolical philosophy: There is no such thing as greatness, or honor, or beauty, goodness, or truth.
That’s a lot to blame on a statue, huh? Even one that’s 12 feet tall.
But the ultimate purpose of this kind of propaganda isn’t merely to push cultural relativism. It’s to accumulate power. Once the left has “disrupted” the idea of greatness and destroyed our cultural patrimony, it can impose a new set of standards that divides Americans into identity groups based on immutable characteristics like race and sex.
Yeah, it’s not as if the MAGA right is centered around, you know, white identity or anything.
Hence the white man of the past becomes the universal villain and the anonymous fat black woman becomes the true American hero, the one who should be immortalized in bronze.
There are, I should note, two other statues up in Times Square, and not just for a month. They are, of course, statues of white men, and they’ve been there forever. Price didn’t demand that they be torn down and replaced with his statue, merely that his statue be allowed to be displayed alongside them.
Davidson, for his part, does think statues like Price’s should be torn down and replaced with the statues the evil leftist parasites have targeted for forcible retirement in recent years. “Random black women” don’t deserve any sort of public representation, I guess, while the mostly very problematic white dudes in the statues that have been removed across America–like, you know, confederate generals–should be forever honored. Got it.
Nothing racist going on here. Just some good old fashioned art criticism.
EDIT: Thanks to Crip Dyke for the word “testerical.”
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