is what the Nation says America's publicly funded art has, in times of public sector austerity. It's a nice-reading review of two new books, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen and Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding by Tyler Cowen. The review spends a fair amount of time complaining about the authors being insufficiently-opinionated, but it is a nice read. I like its words on the Lincoln Memorial, quoting from Kammen's book:

«Although the Lincoln Memorial--with its surprisingly recent dedication date of 1922--has settled into our collective data bank of patriotic images as a kind of mammoth, extra-reassuring department store Santa, a young Lewis Mumford fumed at the time that the monument exuded "not the living beauty of our American past, but the mortuary air of archaeology. The America that Lincoln was bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous America that he wished to preserve, has nothing in common with the sedulously classic monument."»

Labels: USA

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