Trump 3 July, 2020 Speech, This Moment in Time

[_EAllusion]

I love the "no abstract or modernist art!" demand. It's like authoritarians are issued the same playbook to read from.

It's difficult to know exactly where this came from specifically in the case of Trump's call for a design study, but it seems at least in part like a continuation of the controversy around the Vietnam War Memorial that included very heated words exchanged between the 21 year old landscape architect student Maya Lin, who won the design competition with the idea of the v-shaped wall cut into a mound, and sculptor Frederick Hart who was asked to add in classical sculptures after a number of vets protested the black granite wall was essentially a tombstone.. The memorial itself seems to be a nice blend of both abstract and classic from my experience visiting it in the late 90's but the story around it is interesting. To be honest, it left my view of Lin quite tainted and I've not viewed her work since particularly favorably. I believe the concept of the memorial including a wall with the names of every soldier who was lost in Vietnam inscribed was a requirement of the design competition which renders the argument she turned it into a tombstone maybe more substantial if she did not originally propose the idea of recognizing the individuals rather than focus on the war in abstract. My personal experience with it did find the effect of bringing the visitor down into the earth to view the names to be moving but I can also see the reverse of it. I think it does give the place a sense of mourning that aligns more with anti-war interpretation than it elevated the servicemen who would spend two decades or more having their particular sacrifices seem different from those who fought in other wars. That's not the fault of abstraction as a choice, but the choice of what to represent through abstraction though.

Hart had a story about Lin where, when she first saw the statues, asked how they had been able to breathe when he had them in the mold casting? He found it cheap of her to not recognize a classic sculptor carved the details from models rather than merely posing and then taking a cast of the model. I'm sure there are numerous telling of their feud on the net. It's interesting.

That said I really liked the Korean War memorial with the life sized squad on patrol that you walk among...so I might have a bias here against abstraction in the wrong hands.

I think it's more that social conservatives with an authoritarian mindset tend to dislike abstract art in preference for realism or "people's" art, especially as it relates to politics. The sort of person who would be deep into white grievance politics and neo-fascism is exactly the sort of person who would have a surly attitude about "modern" art that is actually quite old at this point.

My temptation is to explain it in the fact that these people tend to score very low in the "openness to experience" part of the Big 5 which also correlates strongly with a preference for realism over abstraction, but I'd rather just leave it as an unexplained pattern.

Political art almost always becomes realism focused when authoritarian types take over. This happens on both the right and left.

[_honorentheos]

I have it in my head that either Eric Hofer or George Orwell had made the observation that authoritarian regimes supported by mass movements lose art to literalism. That's not quite the same thing as realism but the idea is the movement destroys the creative soul of artists who turn their artistic talents to propoganda, knowingly or otherwise. Whenever a new John McNaughton piece gets mentioned here the idea comes to mind. But I can't find the quote nor remember for sure who said it.