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.
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 . . .
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.
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