It's Time For The Right To Make Art Great (And Beautiful) Again

The city of New York recently unveiled a grotesque statue of a horned, spaghetti-armed female figure slathered in gaudy gold atop one of its appellate courthouses. The apparent effort to one-up Boston’s new “Embrace” sculpture — which purports to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but resembles feces at best and a male appendage at worst — looks like what you might imagine if the Starbucks logo and Medusa had an unholy merger. Perhaps appropriately, the figure named in tribute to the fight for abortion looks more like a demon than a woman.

Conservatives responding to public “art” installations like these will justifiably complain about the annoyance of having to look at such ugliness in parks and on street corners. They may insightfully point out that such acts of rebellion against beauty reflect a cultural disdain for religion and the nature of humanity itself (as Nathan Stone argued well in these pages here). But one thing conservatives rarely do in response — for fiscal reasons or otherwise — is create alternative, better art.