Erin L. Thompson is a TomDispatch regular and a professor of art crime at John Jay College (CUNY). An expert on the deliberate destruction of art, she is the author of the forthcoming Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Norton, 2021). Follow her on Twitter @artcrimeprof.
The Banality of Evocation
When it comes to the feminist movement, monuments to individuals are “a standing historic lie” because women’s rights have been won “by a steady history of millions of women and men… working together at the best of times, separately at the worst.” Wagner believes that to honor individuals for such achievements today is to disempower the movement itself.
August 27, 2020