ghijkmnop wrote:How did you feel when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan? Should we destroy much of Helmut Newton's work because of its oppressive depiction of women? Should we ban Orson Scott Card's writing because he's a homophobe? The list is endless on this slippery slope, and I'm sure most of it is in that "separate the art from the artist" thread.
As an artist, I completely disagree with the destruction of art--and regardless of the message it sends, this is art. If you disagree, you must at least concede that it's master craftsmanship.
What's the part of art that actually matters: the physical object, or the ideas and craftsmanship involved?
I don't think we should destroy or ban all copies of Orson Scott Card's books, or Helmut Newton's photography, but I certainly don't want them edified and maintained on publicly funded national landmarks. They belong in our libraries and/or museums, where we preserve that kind of thing for future generations, and they should continue to be taught in relevant courses. I would extend the Stone Mountain relief the same courtesy. There are already photographs of it, we could take a digital scan of it, and we could reproduce it in other places. That's more care and attention than %99 of all art has ever gotten.
But a physical object doesn't become immune from being reused towards a different purpose just because someone has doodled over it. Someone above likened it to the same principal as Graffiti, and I agree. The relief is on public property now, it's the prerogative of the public to decide whether or not they want to keep it around. Imagine if you bought a house, and along one of the walls was a giant, beautiful mural of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and King Leopold of Belgium. I wouldn't want to live in that space. I might take a photograph of it for posterity, but ultimately I would have it painted over, wouldn't you? It's the same here. The art that we use to adorn our public, governmental spaces is a statement of who we are and what we stand for, and the leaders of the Confederacy are not that.
Someone else above suggested carving "these guys were racist, don't be like them" above it in the rock, and I actually think that would be worse. You would be altering the work, censoing the work, perverting the message, the idea, of the art, just in order to preserve that one physical iteration of it. I think that's backwards.