Posted on 01/10/2012 12:50:46 PM PST by mojito
...The present Eisenhower Memorial design, by postmodernist Frank Gehry, has virtually nothing to do with the Dwight David Eisenhower of history. Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. The Gehry conceit seems both obvious and entirely in tune with the postmodern deconstruction of history: There are no great men; there are no great virtues; there is no great striving; nor is there great accomplishment or great service to others. No one, visiting the Eisenhower Memorial as designed by Frank Gehry, would have the slightest reason to grasp the truth of the man himself....
None of it is conveyed by the other elements in the Gehry design: 80-foot-tall, nondescript cylindrical posts (they can’t even be properly described as pillars) holding up perforated metal “tapestries,” creating what Gehry himself once called a “theater for cars.” But what does a “theater for cars,” or any other kind of postmodernist knock-off of a Fifties drive-in, have to do with creating a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander who planned the invasion of Normandy, the president who ended the Korean War and who proposed “Open Skies” as a means to lower the temperature of the Cold War?
Nothing. And that, one is forced to conclude, is the idea....
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
“The Gehry design was chosen in a closed competition, which itself suggests that the fix was in for Frank Gehry from the beginning. Having seen his design for a new wing of the Corcoran Gallery of Art go unrealized, Gehry and his acolytes at the General Services Administration now seem determined to get a Gehry into monumental Washington, even if, in the process, they distort history with another postmodernist confection that speaks to no one outside their small, gnostic sect.”
Etiam non princeps sed usque ad genua, Principis Pacis!
This seems like an appropriate place to ask if anyone here has seen the Pentagon 911 memorial, and what you thought of it?
What the hell is that?
I have to wonder sometimes, when I look at this stuff, if the problem isn’t that no one living today has the artistic talent and training to actually do a statue that looks like a human being. We have been training these people in these loopy art colleges for years that whatever they come up with is art. We have ended up with “artists” who are really not artists; but, almost anti-artists.
Now that is a monument...
Etiam non princeps sed usque ad genua, Principis Pacis!
A Gehry 'masterpiece' described at post #7.
At first it is Ghastly, but like the Vietnam Memorial, it will soon become un-ghastly. Growing up under Ike, I would prefer a statue as large as the Hussein one that was torn down in Baghdad. It could be up on a pedestal, wearing his Ike jacket uniform, and have a gulf club in one hand and a fishing pole in the other and I would still like it. My greatest fear of ghastly is that one day we might find Obama on Mt Rushmore next to Jimmah Carter.
PS.....He’s the only President in my time, that brings tears to my eyes when I see pictures of him.
Oh, dear. Whoever commissioned Frank Gehry should lose their job. They probably tried to get Christo, but he died on ‘em.
(I assume the dead trees represent Europe after Eisenhower bombed the crap out of it)
“”The “memorial benches” look like modernistic diving boards. How does this memorialize 911?””
That never made any sense to me either; no more than the chairs that are in the Oklahoma city memorial. And I don’t think it has anything to do with us not appreciating art. We see things straight forward - not with twisted minds. Of course, we can’t be perceived as intelligent as the artists are either. OK by me.
Eisenhower’s family have objected to this design for years and have been trying to get it halted ... or altered.
That was poison-dripping sarcasm, BTW.
“Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity.”
Frankly, the entire setting of the memorial is crap and should be scrapped.
However, there’s something beautiful about the idea having the statue of him as a child on the Great Plains. It would really speak to that well-honed simple American strength that was so prevalent in small town America.
Were it properly done, I think it’d be an amazing and powerful tribute to Eisenhower: evoking the image of the child to highlight the greatness that would follow.
This must be where President Reagan made one of his D-Day memorial speeches? Great speech!!!
I literally live a block from that.
Don’t even get me started.
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