IT’S COME TO THIS: In Santa Monica, Homeless Sculpture Installed in Former Home of Iconic Mural.
November 20, 2019 — A seven-foot-tall sculpture of a homeless man was unveiled Monday in the courtyard of the former Santa Monica bank building once graced by the iconic mural “Pleasures Along the Beach.”
Titled “In The Image,” the work by Los Angeles artist and activist Ed Massey was installed two and a half months after the mural by renown artist Millard Sheets was relocated to the City of Orange (“How Santa Monica Lost Its Iconic Half-Century Old Mosaic,” June 7, 2019).
The new sculpture — which will be on display for six weeks — depicts a bearded homeless man in baggy clothes staring at a red plastic cup in his hand, a blanket draped across a shoulder.
The sculpture installed at the 50-year-old Home Savings building on 26th Street and Wilshire Boulevard “simultaneously references contemporary social themes and historical religious imagery,” according to Massey.
The work, the artist wrote in an accompanying description, invites passersby to “contemplate their views and elevate their discourse on the issue — one that has now come to affect us all where we work and live.”
As Roger Kimball wrote a decade ago at the New Criterion, PC England once again led the way; the American left is only now just catching up:
Trafalgar is full of lessons. When my wife and I visited London last September, we took our young son, a fervent admirer of Nelson, to Trafalgar Square to see Nelson’s column. We were surprised to see that it had company. On one of the plinths behind the famous memorial sat a huge sculpture of white marble. This, I knew, was one of the benefactions that Ken Livingstone, the Communist mayor of London, had bestowed on his grateful constituency: public art on Trafalgar Square that was more in keeping with cool Britannia’s new image than statues of warriors. From a distance, the white blob looked liked a gigantic marshmallow in need of an air pump. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a sculpture of an armless and mostly legless woman, with swollen breasts and distended belly. In fact, it was a sculpture by Marc Quinn of one Alison Lapper, made when she was eight months pregnant. Ms. Lapper, who was born with those horrible handicaps, is herself an artist. Asked how she felt about the sculpture, Ms. Lapper said that she was glad that at last Trafalgar Square recognized someone who was not a white male murderer. It is worth noting, as one journalist pointed out, that the architects of Trafalgar Square were ahead of their time in at least one sense, for the sculpture of Ms. Lapper represented the second commemoration of a seriously disabled person. After all, there is Nelson on his column, missing his right arm and an eye.
Regarding the Santa Monica statue, Moonbattery notes, “A society erects statues of those who embody the values it venerates. That’s why statues of great historical figures who represent the best of our culture when it was healthy are under attack (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, George Washington) now that it is sick with moonbattery. New statues will appear that reflect what we believe in currently: irresponsibility, self-imposed victimhood, self-indulgence, uselessness, dysfunction, psychosis. This process has already begun.”
(Via Maggie’s Farm, which as always, is loaded with links even during this holiday week.)
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The homeless statue sounds like something out of Kurt Schlichter’s Collapse, but then, as he says, actual events keep overtaking his parody of leftism.