-What IS this statue depicting?
-Does this mark a low point for art in the West?
-Which other nations are leading the charge AGAINST woke arts?
A new MLK statue was unveiled in Boston and it had some heads turning to say the least! Keep reading as I break down the destruction of arts in the West and how we can stop it!
What the heck is that?
The bronze sculpture called “The Embrace” honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King has just been unveiled on the #Boston Common #MLK #MLKDay2023 #MLKDay
— Antonio Figueiredo (@afigueiredo) January 16, 2023
This past weekend, the city of Boston unveiled its tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King, with a massive $10 million dollar bronze statue titled ‘The Embrace.’ Now, the concept, you should know, was innocent enough, indeed endearing, its aim was to depict the moment MLK and his wife embraced after he found out that he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And when you scale the photograph of the embrace to overlap the sculpture, you can see it! But what the artist obviously didn’t see is how, absent that larger image, the sculpture comes across as very, very odd; many have called it frankly phallic. From some angles it appears that the hands are holding a colon or a giant turd as thousands on Twitter have complained! So whatever the concept was that the artist was after, it failed, it failed from a technical as well as conceptual vantage point. But more than that, the statue comes across as simply ugly, some have even called it utterly grotesque.
The Babylon Bee went a step further, they set up a satirical crowdfunding site to help finish the job, to help fund the completion of the statue! In other words, where’s the head, the body, this can’t be it! Many on twitter complained that what they really needed to do was actually cover the monument back up, it was better that way! Now, some are trying to argue, OF COURSE, that all of this criticism and mockery is inspired by none other than racism, but as it turns out, even members of King’s family have voiced their outrage over the epic artistic fail! Coretta Scott King’s cousin, Seneca Scott, published a piece absolutely obliterating the statue entitled, I kid you not: ‘A Masturbatory Homage to My Family’ saying that the statue looks more like hands holding private parts than it does a special moment shared by two people.
What’s going on here? Well what’s imperative for us to understand is that art simply ain’t what it used to be! Historically, beauty was considered inextricably linked to the formation, the cultivation of our loves, so that we would learn to love rightly. Up until the beginning of last century, the cosmic values of Truth and Goodness were made known to us most explicitly in and through Beauty. From Plato onward, beauty wasn’t a mere sentiment, a personal opinion, merely subjective. Beauty was an eternal value that existed outside of us and all around us. Beauty was the radiance, the delightfulness, the delectableness of the True and the Good, which awakened within us an eros, or a desire for the True and the Good. Historically, Beauty is literally physics. This is why we association beauty with attraction; beauty serves as a gravitational pull that draws our loves and desires towards the True and the Good, so that we can learn to love what’s truly lovely and desire what’s truly desirable and hence experience our highest human flourishing. THIS was the purpose of the artist. Artists were under a moral obligation to reveal to humanity the true, the good, and the beautiful so as to awaken our loves and desires and draw us into eternal and divine life and thus realize humanity’s highest flourishing and aspirations.
Those days, thanks to the rise of the secular modern age, are largely gone. They’ve been replaced with a completely subjective view of art. Art is whatever you want it to be, in fact, there’s even the belligerent polemic: Who are you to define art? And so, in the place of the historic, civilizational building vision of art, art has gone woke. It’s now in the service of politics, and not just any politics, but particularly what’s called emancipatory politics. Emancipatory politics is a globalist-inspired idea that re-envisions the state as a grand liberator of people groups who are considered to have been otherwise disenfranchised from the political process. So what emancipatory politics does is it views societies and races and genders in light of power discrepancies, where a dominant identity or culture, that’s usually designated as white and male, disenfranchises and discriminates against minority identities and cultures.
The key here is that this is forever the permanent state of society unless or until cultural Marxist liberals come to power. So emancipatory politics is a Marxist political idea that re-envisions the state as a grand liberator of individuals from traditions and customs, including artistic traditions and customs, that are now deemed oppressive and discriminatory. And thus, the whole point of art today, in service to this emancipatory vision, is to liberate populations from precisely the kind of world that traditional art and culture helped shape! THAT is why so much art today looks so horrifically and embarrassingly hideous; it’s MEANT to! It’s rebelling against the world of truth, goodness, and beauty precisely because that world has now been recast as racist and whatever-phobic! But there is some very good news on this front! Traditional approaches to art are making a comeback big time, all over the world!
One of the places where traditional art is making a massive comeback is in the nation of Hungary. The nationalist populist Hungarian government led by the one and only Viktor Orban has been busy enacting reforms throughout the nation with the aim of rooting out any trace of globalist Marxist leftism and implementing a robust nationalist populist and traditionalist agenda for generations to come. And central to these series of reforms is the revitalization of the arts, and particularly theater in Hungary. Hungary’s government spends more on culture and the arts than almost any other nation in Europe, in terms of its gross domestic product. Recently the government announced that they are setting up a National Cultural Council, headed by a government minister, with the task of ‘setting priorities and directions to be followed in Hungarian culture.’
In addition, Hungary is seeing a renaissance of classical architecture building projects, all in an effort to reawaken precisely that traditional vision of art, which serves as a mediator to awaken our loves and direct them to the eternal source of truth, goodness, and beauty! It’s an astonishing project, but we’re seeing it being replicated throughout the world, particularly in Russia and India, where art and building projects are returning to traditionalist roots! Unfortunately for us, we were reminded this woke weekend how long we have to go before we, too, return to our historic roots; but don’t despair; woke art entails its own demise; a far more beautiful future is at hand!
