Writerings

This hot take comes from 2020.

I believe we should take down all statues, not just the ones of the morally reprehensible. Statues belong in a certain time period, namely the past, along with lithographic prints and reliefs. In those olden days, statues made sense. Without access to any form of media, how was a poor serf supposed to know what their betters looked like? How would they have reverence for their great deeds in the name of King and Country. The invention of photography and mass media made that redundant let alone the internet. 

This leads me to another problem with statues, which is that these days we can also more clearly see that statues rarely capture the likeness of the person they are supposed to portray. Think of the infamous bust of Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most photographed people in the world, possibly across all of history. It doesn’t look like him. Not even in an interpretive sense. The whole world can see that (as evidenced by the sheer number of wags who pointed out looks like Niall Quinn. Although it doesn’t actually look much like him either.)

Something, something, but cancel culture rebuttal.

If we’re going to have statues persist as an art form (I’m loath to make a whole swathe of creatives unemployed), let’s stick to fictional characters. And at that, preferably non-human ones. Paddington Bear can stay. Maybe a Henry Moore.