SF Public Art: the Latest Chapter in the Culture War

Piss Christ

Lefties used to laugh at the bluenoses who wanted to put fig leaves on nude statues.

They mocked the negative reaction by many Christians to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist's urine. A work of art should provoke feelings in the observer, they said, your personal morality limits you.

Four decades later Progressives turned a blind eye to the toppling of historical public works that reflected "power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism." The destruction accelerated during the George Floyd riots of 2020.

The city had its share of monuments destroyed in 2020 when bronze statues of Junipero Serra, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key were all knocked off their pedestals by protesters in Golden Gate Park. The city removed the statue of Christopher Columbus at Coit Tower to avoid a similar fate. All four statues are now secured in storage.

2018: SF removed an "Early Days" statue depicting
a white missionary towering over a supine Indian.

Now San Francisco will spend $3 million from a Mellon grant to determine which works are acceptable and which are offensive.

San Francisco is about to embark on evaluating its nearly 100 statues and monuments to figure out which ones no longer represent the city’s values and should be removed from view, relocated or re-interpreted with explanatory plaques.

The debate over the city’s monuments began in 2018 with the removal of the “Early Days” sculpture from the Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center because it represented a Native American seated before a Spanish Catholic missionary. The effort gathered steam amid the racial-justice movement in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd. That year, crowds toppled statues throughout the country that glorified Confederate Civil War leaders, which critics said paid homage to the country’s racist past.

The survey of San Francisco’s civic art collection — funded by a $3 million Mellon Foundation grant — will be conducted by an outside firm and should be completed by January.

The project, called “Shaping Legacy,” was discussed at an Arts Commission meeting last week when senior project manager Angela Carrier explained that looking at San Francisco’s monuments and memorials as a whole shows “a concentration that talks about power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”

“These monuments no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for,” she added.

IMHO, this is a self-defeating move by Progressives. Keeping the "bad" monuments up would be a constant reminder of San Francisco's white supremacist past and prove that this claim has validity.

Another observation, updated now that Progressives control big cities, media, and the elite colleges: art, like free speech, can still provoke, as long as it doesn't go against the Progressive narrative.

We'll end this post with a quote include in the article from Stanford History professor James T. Campbell:

"To me, the real danger of these kind of exercises is not so much historical erasure as self-congratulation, with all of us pointing accusatory fingers at our benighted forbears and patting ourselves on the back for our own superior moral wisdom,” he said. “It’s worth asking what San Franciscans a hundred years from now might say when they audit us."