What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves
Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end. Readers will remember the
