Another Call to Start Over (ignore)
I thought this was going to be the West Coast version of "scrap the WTC memorial finalists" but it takes a strange turn at the end.
9/11 Memorial Needs a Heroic Touch (Catesby Leigh, LA Times)
At the World Trade Center site, New York and the nation would be much better served by a heroic, figurative memorial instead of anything resembling the banal competition finalists. This great tradition, after all, has been around for more than two millenniums, not two decades, and the human figure remains the most meaningful of art's symbols. It has given this country its finest monuments and memorials: the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall with its majestic evocation of the martyred president, the regimental monuments -- a treasury of figurative symbols -- on the Gettysburg battlefield and the Statue of Liberty.
...
To get such a monument would take another act of courage: Calling a halt to the competition and starting over. This time with a process open to the heroic tradition.
So, what is he asking for, a fireman, a policeman? Why not throw Lincoln in there since he loves him so much? The more Great White Men the merrier. Anyone remember the hubbub over the bronze 9/11 firefighter memorial, based on that photograph of all white firefighters? The one where they later tried to represent a white man, a black man, and a latino? (What ever happened to that statue anyway?) Isn't it stupidly obvious what happens when you omit Arabs from such a memorial? And just because there were hardly, if any, Asian firemen and policemen, does that exclude them from the "heroic" memorial?
Maybe you could find some hermaphroditic multiethnic lovechild of multiethnic GI babies and model the statue on the he-she. It would help if he/she were old but baby-faced, too.
* Ray, 12/09/2003 09:27:14 AM
