Crossroads: Destroying art — whether it’s statues in Afghanistan or Confederate memorials in the South — is always a mistake.
Destroying works of art for ideological reasons has a bad reputation — and for good reason: iconoclasts over the centuries have worked very hard to earn that reputation.
The fervent Protestants and zealous revolutionaries who smashed stained glass windows and devotional statuary in England, France and various German states two to four centuries ago have few defenders today. The Taliban who dynamited statues in Afghanistan for religious blasphemy decades ago find only condemnation except among fellow extremists. I suspect that the activists seeking to destroy Confederate statues for secular blasphemy in the United States today won’t fare much better.
In each case, the smashers have justified their vandalism on the ground that “the” meaning of the art is odious: papal oppression and clerical obscurantism; polytheism and idolatry; or, in the present controversy, white supremacy and the delusional nobility of the Lost Cause.
The problem is that there’s no such thing as “the” meaning of a work of art. Art almost invariably has multiple meanings. Indeed, contemporary academic dogma insists that art has no intrinsic meaning and that each viewer is entitled to invest a given work of art with whatever “meaning” that viewer chooses. We needn’t embrace the outer limits of academic silliness, however, to recognize the inherent ambiguity and fluidity of artistic meaning.
The planter plutocracy in the deep South led its region into treasonous war to preserve slavery and, indeed, to keep the door open to its indefinite expansion. If there’s a colorable moral defense for the course the planters took, I’ve never heard it. Against that background, let’s accept for purposes of discussion the currently fashionable statue narrative (which may actually be true): After the South’s defeat, that plutocracy and its descendants went on periodic statuebuilding binges in an effort to lend a patina of nobility to its disastrous leadership, to celebrate white supremacy and to squelch any aspiration to political or social equality on the part of freed slaves and their descendants.
The fallacy of the false alternative arises the moment you call that meaning “the” meaning of Confederate statuary. Stained glass windows can be about devotion to God and the beauty of his creation as readily as they can be about the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books (rather more readily, in fact). In the same way, for those aching with nostalgia for a regime of white supremacy, a statue of Robert E. Lee can indeed be about the Southern planter plutocracy’s invidious self-justification. For the descendants of barefoot privates who fought (in a memorable phrase quoted by Shelby Foote) “’cause y’all are down heah,” however, that statue can just as legitimately be “about” history or heritage or some other shorthand for “We lost a war waged mostly on our soil but we fought gallantly and it helped form our sense of ourselves.” White supremacists have no monopoly on meaning for the statues in question.
Descendants of slaves and many others may find both meanings vile. They may find the plutocrats’ meaning hateful and the Southern white commoners’ meaning at best irrelevant and at worst deformed by false consciousness and complicit in atrocity.
That view justifies a great many things — but it doesn’t justify destruction of art. No one has the right to leverage any meaning they impute to any work of art into a justification for destroying artistic creation.
And let’s not kid ourselves, destruction is what’s in play here. Sometimes, as when North Carolina activists pulled down a statue not of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson but of an anonymous Confederate ranker, the destruction is literal. Activists demanding effacement of the Confederate iconography on Stone Mountain, in Georgia, might as well call in the Taliban as technical advisers. More often, the destruction is de facto. But it always secretes the vice of vandalism.
To put art where people can’t appreciate it is to destroy it. The governor of North Carolina asked his state’s DNR to come up with alternative sites for the array of statues he’d like to remove; somehow I don’t think he had equally accessible public spaces in mind. Those civic leaders in Baltimore and New Orleans who propose to warehouse the statues in anticipation of putting them in some vaguely referenced museum at some unspecified time in the future aren’t fooling anyone but themselves. No such museum re-displays will ever happen. Not a penny to finance them will ever be appropriated. The statues will (at best) rot in warehouses or storage yards or obscure corners, out of sight and functionally inaccessible for the vast majority of people. To those who say that’s exactly what should happen to the things — congratulations on your candor; but don’t tell me that amounts to anything short of de facto destruction.
You want to generate art that tells a bigger story? Create plaques that put the statues in a more accurate context? Erect new statues that illustrate a counter-narrative? Fine. Count me in. Etch away, and sculpt to your hearts’ content. I’m with you. The notions that secession wasn’t about slavery and that slavery really wasn’t all that bad drive me nuts, and I’ll chip in for any effective effort to debunk them.
But I won’t sign on for iconoclasm (or for desecration of grave sites, the City of Madison’s creative variation on iconoclasm). Those calling for subtraction from public art rather than addition to it are just as sincere as the Roundheads and the Jacobins and the Taliban — and just as tragically misguided.