American museums used to have art exhibitions that dignified the human spirit. By contrast, today’s museums promote the wonton destruction and desecration of great works of art, mainly targeting the South, as in LA’s Monuments Exhibition. Museums currently have policies that are more in keeping with Joseph Goebbels who said, “We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.”
According to Tate museum’s art-term dictionary, a curator “is someone employed by a museum or gallery to manage a collection of artworks or artifacts…and acquire, care for and develop a collection.” Curators also arrange displays and interpret the collection “in order to inform, educate and inspire the public.” The problem at hand is that “care for” has been abandoned by certain contemporary ‘curators’, who, like Goebbles, have politicized western art away from its Judeo-Christian tradition, disparaging the memetic classically trained Beaux arts sculptors. “Curator” Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African Heritage Center in Charlottesville, went against curatorial protocol and actually oversaw the complete melting down of Shrady/Lentelli’s equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, ingots of which are now on display at the LA Monuments show.
The curatorial malpractice extends to cancelling– never discussing— important theological tenets surrounding the historical context of the statues. For instance, the Lost Cause which formed a landscape of memory, was a post-war movement in the South to memorialize the noblest aspects of the Confederacy’s struggle for Independence, which was deemed a given by those subscribing to the original Constitution of 1787, where the states were in a voluntary compact of their own choosing. Current museum curators such as Hamza Walker of LA Monuments who refuse to follow conservation principles, brazenly describe the Lost Cause as a “myth” rather than a natural response to widespread carnage (over 300,000 killed in the South) and altering of the Constitution as they understood it. The Lost Cause was suffused with a Judeo-Christian ethic, from speeches to ceremonies, to clergy giving long-form sermons and eulogies, to hymns and prayers.
The new radical curators and art historians disparage and seek to redefine the Lost Cause away from its provable aims Thus, those academics as well as the curators, commit a form of malpractice in their interpretation of the leaders who fought against actual invasion of their homeland and destruction and theft of their farms and property. Complexitites of the slave issue, notwithstanding, the life and death aspect of the struggle seems to further the real American myth of the virtuous North fighting to liberate slaves in the wicked South. (See Lincoln’s first inaugural address.) As to the BHM survey it also now concentrates on monuments created during the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, 1870 to 1955 but never really clarifies why it’s emphasizing the Lost Cause.
