The placement of a new, 12-foot-high bronze statue in Times Square, New York City’s most famous tourist and entertainment district, by the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit organization financed by local businesses, raises the question of just what public art is for. (The statue, made by London-based sculptor Thomas J. Price, will stand in place until June 17, as part of a system of rotating displays of contemporary art.) What is remarkable about the statue is its sheer ordinariness. It depicts an anonymous black woman, overweight and casually dressed, hands on hips, looking more or less straight ahead with a somewhat dour expression, despite the ambiguous title the sculptor gave it, “Grounded in the Stars.”
In a “guide” to the statue posted on its website, Times Square Arts (a division of the Alliance) explains that Price’s “multidisciplinary” work “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.” Elsewhere, the New York Times has described Price’s overall work in recent years as “directly critiqu[ing] the traditions of public monuments and portraiture.” According to a release by a Los Angeles gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is currently hosting an exhibit of “related works” by Price at another New York location, people who have criticized “Grounded in the Stars” have misunderstood it as a “traditional monument,” when it is actually “an artwork about monuments,” which in conjunction with Price’s other works, “amplif[ies] traditionally marginalized bodies and redress[es] structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we choose to celebrate in art.”
According to Price himself, the intent of “Grounded in the Stars” and an accompanying set of stop-motion animations scheduled to be posted on Times Square billboards is to highlight “the intrinsic value of the individual and amplif[y] traditionally marginalized bodies on a monumental scale” so as to “instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity.” Indeed (quoting again from the Times Square Alliance), while “the young woman depicted in ’Grounded in the Stars’ carries familiar qualities, from her stance and countenance to her everyday clothing,” in her depiction “one recognizes a shared humanity,” while her pose and “the ease of her stance” constitute “a subtle nod to Michelangelo’s David.” Thus, the statue “disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.”
The foregoing selections of what is, to be frank, academic and political gobbledygook from the art world exemplify the point that the late, great novelist and social and cultural critic Tom Wolfe skewered in his book-length essay The Painted Word: a painting or other artistic work that needs a couple of paragraphs or more (when posted in a museum) to explain what the artist was “trying to say” isn’t really art at all. We commonly gaze at paintings by artists ranging from Rembrandt and Franz Hals to, say, the French Impressionists or the Hudson River School with a view to appreciating their beauty, or the emotions their subjects inspire, without needing a guide to tell us what the painter’s aim was. (Commonly, with the occasional exception of a work like Picasso’s “Guernica,” we have no interest in the artist’s political views either, any more than we would look to a politician to provide us with insight into art.)
Going further, however, what can it mean to say that a sculpture isn’t really a “monument” but rather “an artwork about monuments”? If the sculptor’s complaint was that not enough monuments portray people he believes have been “marginalized,” why not just publish an essay making his argument?
As a Fox News columnist quoted by the Times points out, the celebration by art “professionals” of Price’s sculpture of an anonymous, unimpressive figure whose sole “distinguishing” feature is that she happens to be black stands in marked contrast to the official removal in 2022, following the George Floyd riots, of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that had stood in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History for 80 years. While Roosevelt was a man of multiple achievements in and out of politics, the particular reason for honoring him in front of the museum is that he was an avid and accomplished naturalist. Nonetheless, the museum administrators proclaimed in explaining their decision, his statue—which depicted T. R. on horseback, accompanied by standing American Indian and African male figures (chosen, it is said, to represent some of the diverse areas of the world where he went hunting and exploring)—needed to be removed because it “communicat[ed] a racial hierarchy that the Museum and members of the public have long found disturbing.” (It was “hierarchical” simply because Roosevelt was the only member of the trio on horseback.)
Few of us possess the potential to rival the achievements of a Teddy Roosevelt. But one of the proper functions of great statues and other forms of art is to encourage us to make the effort.
Having grown up in the New York City area, periodically visiting the Museum on school trips as well as with my parents, and later bringing my daughters there, I actually found the statue of Roosevelt the most memorable part of the museum (surpassed only by the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton inside). As a student of politics, I have found much to disagree with in the Progressive political thinking that Roosevelt turned to during the last decade of his career, as he sought to regain the presidency. But like anyone with the least familiarity with his life, I cannot avoid being inspired, even awed, by his many achievements—from overcoming debilitating asthma by “roughing it” (a model he recommended to all Americans in “The Strenuous Life”), to the charge up San Juan Hill, and eventually as president. And for the record, as president he not only issued Executive Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the most important Federal move in support of the rights of African Americans since Reconstruction, but named black officials to significant federal positions, even in the South, and was the first occupant of the White House to invite a black leader (Booker T. Washington) to dine there with him.
For those wondering about the fate of the Roosevelt statue: following its removal, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation announced it would accept the item as a long-term loan from New York City for display at the library, scheduled to open in Medora, North Dakota, in 2026. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt IV remarked, in language more appropriate for one of those New York art critics than of his ancestor, that it was “fitting that the statue is being relocated to a place where its composition can be recontextualized to facilitate difficult, complex and inclusive discussions.” In fact, the library’s remote location—admittedly the site where the young T. R. went to build up his physical constitution—makes it unlikely that it will facilitate many discussions, inclusive or otherwise. And in any event, not only is the statue currently in storage, but no plans have been announced for it to be displayed even when the library opens. Sic transit gloria.
In this context, it is worth recalling an observation the great French analyst Alexis de Tocqueville made in Democracy in America. The general equality of condition among Americans (of course, excluding slaves), in contrast to the relatively fixed social and political hierarchy that characterized European nations like France, suggested to us “the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man.” That is, seeing how far many of his compatriots (and likely, he himself) have already advanced beyond the attainments of previous generations inspires the American to strive to surpass them. Tocqueville even quotes the explanation an American sailor gave him of why Americans build their vessels to last only a short time: since “the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily” because “the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years.” Tocqueville portrays these words of a man of low social condition as exemplifying “the general and systematic idea according to which a great people conducts all things.”
Few of us possess the potential to rival in our lives the achievements of a Teddy Roosevelt. But one of the proper functions of great statues and other forms of art (including music and literature) is surely to encourage us to make the effort. Had the sculptor of “Grounded in the Stars” wanted to contribute to the inspiration and elevation of black Americans, there are plenty of real achievers—in statesmanship, education, literature, sports, music, the military, for starters—he could have chosen to memorialize. Instead, in a 2020 essay for Time magazine, he explained that his work aimed to show that “if you’re a black person being represented in sculpture, you don’t have to be an athlete, or strike a pose, or fulfil an expectation.”
Of course, the greatest artists did not limit their portrayals to persons of high achievement. But do most African-Americans really want to be “represented,” in one of the world’s most public spaces, by an anonymous statue of a perfectly ordinary-looking woman? In what way, in the words of the Times Square Alliance, does “Grounded in the Stars” “disrupt” our understanding of which figures deserve to be “monumentalized,” other than to say that mediocrity is good enough, and any endeavor to surpass it is inherently “hierarchical” and therefore racist? Not only Tocqueville and T. R., but Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King Jr. would be appalled.
