Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

photo credit: alcalde.texasexes.org

The above pictures monument of Rev Martin Luther King, Jr. is at the University of Texas; it was installed in 1999. It captures the inspiration of the man. 

Then there is the The Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial monument in DC, which was dedicated in 2011. At that time, blogger Aaron Worthing at patterico’s pontifications had this to say:

However, there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr King appears slightly Asian in Mr Lei’s rendering.

And of course the actual work was mainly outsourced:

Mr Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.

More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stone masons brought over specifically for the project.

Personally, I think to focus on the ethnicity of the man kind of misses the point of Dr. King’s legacy.  If the best sculptor doesn’t happen to be black, what of it?

Wanting to have it made in America isn’t wrong, however, but let me posit this.  If it should be a source of national pride for the Chinese that one of their own made this, then perhaps it will encourage the Chinese to learn more about the man.  They will learn in his belief in freedom, and equality of opportunity.  They will learn of his courage, and he will tell them forthrightly from the grave that it was his faith that gave him that courage.  Is that such a bad thing?  It seems the Chinese could use some of his philosophy.

So my only objection is, well…  look at it.

Photo credit: AP via Patterico’s Pontifications

The monument is intended to honor a great American, but instead it brings to mind the role of cultural Marxism in expressions of art, architectures, etc., and, in this case, statuary. Jay’s Analysis has a summary of that school of expression:

It is a frequently misunderstood notion that "modern" and "abstract" art was an organic development that arose from grassroots battles against "oppression" and the "folk art" of the lower classes. In fact, ugly, degenerate art arose from Soviet and communist circles as a means to attack aesthetic beauty. I often remark that "Bauhaus" architecture is communist to the surprise of listeners, but the facts are, "modern art" is almost wholly a communist and Soviet invention of weaponized culture. To understand this, one must look at the Frankfurt School of Marxism, tasked primarily with social engineering and destroying culture.

Weaponized culture was a key tool for destroying the West's social values and social structure. This is also true of the modern transformations of "art" into its own internal nihilist critique of meaning itself  . . .

It’s in the same family as what Olivia Mull described as “Brutalist buildings” in London. Big, clunky, and just plain ugly. Well, that's my take, anyway.

Here’s a link to photos of two dozen monuments to the Reverend. Most of them strike me as a more appropriate tribute to Rev. Martin Luther King than the one in DC.

Here's the background on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

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