The WaPo reports that U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is apparently irked at a proposed statue of Martin Luther King that critics feel is just a tad too Stalinist for their tastes:
A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thinks “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries,” commission secretary Thomas Luebke said in a letter in April.
Some have problems with the ethnicity of the sculptor himself:
Last year, the [Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project] Foundation selected Chinese master sculptor Lei Yixin to work on the memorial. He was banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution but is now considered a national treasure with a lifelong stipend from the government.
Critics said that an African American artist, or any American, would have been preferable. And at least one black sculptor, Ed Dwight of Denver, has said Lei’s models do not resemble King.
“Everybody has this problem with how Dr. King is represented,” Dwight said this week. “You can’t satisfy anybody, because everybody remembers him in a different way.”
The memorial foundation has said that Lei is internationally renowned and was selected for his experience with large public sculptures.
More on Lei Yixin and the MLK statue controversy in a 2007 WaPo piece here.
I was recently told by a prominent Korean architect that Shanghai is home to one of the few remaining communities of Art Deco artisans, mostly on account of the city having one of the world’s largest collections of Art Deco architecture (MUST SEE photo set). I say, if we’re going to outsource even the construction of our national monuments to the Chinese, screw Socialist Realism — go Art Deco! Hey, if it was good enough for Jesus…
