Monumental Misdirection at the Mellon Foundation

Hundreds of millions for woke public art aimed to stoke victimologies

M ost monuments are boringly bad, aesthetically mediocre, and engaging mostly when pigeons, unimpressed by great causes or men, do what pigeons do to outdoor art. Their judgments are ecumenical and evacuational.

Pigeons also would probably disagree with me on one point. We have too many monuments. You’d think the tortured, 20-year path of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington would put people off monuments for a while. It’s not as ugly as it might have been. Oddly, it’s best seen at night, when the big mesh screen makes sense, though who’s walking around the Washington Mall these days after dark?

The Mellon Foundation thinks we need new and improved monuments. Lost in the COVID catastrophe is last month’s big news that the Mellon Foundation has committed $250 million over five years to pay for new monuments or historic storytelling spaces, freshen existing ones with context relevant to today, and remove monuments no one wants because they are bad art or they no longer edify.

That’s a huge amount of money and the primary commitment of the country’s biggest arts and humanities foundation. It’s to be taken seriously and followed closely. This is the foundation’s first step in implementing a strategic shift announced in June. For years, it supported blue-chip arts-and-humanities projects. Now, it’s in the social-justice business. It’s focusing its money on “building just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.”

My car’s a big 1999 Mercedes station wagon. It’s a tank. It would get stuck in all that rhetorical mud.

The initiative is called the Monuments Project, and it’s already spending money.

Last month, the Mellon Foundation made a $4 million, three-year grant to Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based not-for-profit that will do a national audit of memorials and monuments in public places. It’s a big project since there are thousands of monuments ranging from Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial and the Washington Monument to things like the Civil War monument in little North Haven in Connecticut, where I grew up.

Our monument to the Civil War dead in town is artistically insignificant but precise. It’s a massive Rodman cannon mounted on a granite base. Yes, we are commemorating a war, so it’s clear. The cannon never saw combat, and it’s not even from the Civil War. Yes, that’s odd. It was produced for fighting in the Spanish-American War, which ended soon after it started. We got it for free, so that’s Yankee thrift. Hauled to North Haven by sled in 1904, its only connections to the Civil War are the words “preserve the Union” and its placement, facing south, in case the Lost Causers ever tried anything crazy. Yes, it’s literally and figuratively pointed.

So the range is vast. Monument Lab defines a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public.” It advocates for “antiracist, de-colonial, feminist, queer, working class, ecological, and other social justice perspectives” to inform its thinking about monuments.

I think terms like “antiracist” and “de-colonial” aren’t going to help anyone wanting to do something positive. They’re freighted and squishy, accusatory and angry, not useful where a big part of the Mellon Foundation’s work will be educational. You’re not teaching people by insulting them. “Antiracist” is a cliché already, and it means the most to rich, guilty, white liberals, if anyone can define it. That might be the Mellon Foundation’s masters, but it won’t get where they want to be.

Monument Lab is a small outfit. It’s in the information-gathering business now. It’s doing an audit. It’s not an attack dog. It is less than ten years old and has worked mostly in Philadelphia, where I know it for its public murals celebrating African-American Philadelphians. Most of its projects have been temporary. Its experience with longstanding monuments that, like every great work of art, evolve over time, is minimal.

People tend to like their local monuments. They don’t like outsiders descending on their communities, which are much-loved, often lifetime homes, badgering them to be “antiracist” or “de-colonial,” another word that I’ve yet to see defined in a way that makes sense since we Americans, too, were exploited colonists. The Mellon Foundation’s job is persuading people they can have public memorial sculpture with a vision that’s uplifting and purposeful to their daily lives. They need to sell “it’s better” and not “you’re bad” or “we’re mad.”

I would suggest the Mellon Foundation remove photos on its website of monuments trashed by all those mostly peaceful protestors this summer, especially those vandalized with Black Lives Matters graffiti. BLM started, as did the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, as a local action group demanding accountability. It’s a hate group and a racket now. No one knows what it does with its money.

If the Mellon Foundation wants to buy “a national reckoning on race and social justice” with its $250 million, as it says in one of its press releases, it will find itself pouring its money down the drain, which it might not mind. Reckoning is fueled by anger, resentment, and retribution. If it wants to honor more women, people of color, or gay people, or help remove carbuncles that call themselves worthy monuments, it’ll find its work well received. I’d say that up-front.

When I write about a not-for-profit, I always read the biographies of the trustees and, if I’m at a museum, look at the donor wall. I don’t raise money anymore, except for my tiny Methodist church and the library in Arlington, Vt., where I live, but the temptation to steal someone’s donor is among the Devil’s subtlest evils. It’s my heartiest susceptibility.

The Mellon Foundation doesn’t have donors. It’s already rich. I looked at its federal tax filing. It’s really, jaw-droppingly rich, with net assets as of December 31 of $6,818,722,000. That’s billions. I had to confirm with the foundation’s press office that I counted my zeros correctly, simple country soul that I am. Where I live, we pop the cork if we get a $100 gift.

Kathryn Hall chairs the board. She’s San Francisco–based and in the investing business. She’s on the SFMoMA board. Richard Brodhead was the president of Duke University for many years. At the start of his time there, the lacrosse-players disaster happened. I was one of his students at Yale. He taught me how to read the best American literature.

Glenn Lowry is the director of MoMA. I admire him. Thelma Golden is the director and, really, the visionary who made the Studio Museum in Harlem the great place it is. Heather Gerken is the dean of Yale Law School. That’s a mistake. We don’t need monuments to lawyers. Jonathan Holloway was also a dean at Yale before he became president of Rutgers. Alondra Nelson teaches sociology at Princeton.

Joshua Friedman is in the finance business, went to Harvard all the way, and is a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Eric Mindich is in the finance business and chairs the Lincoln Center board. At 27, he became a Goldman Sachs partner.

Katherine Farley works in the finance business in New York. She is an architect and once worked for a construction company. I think every board should have members with construction experience since they know how to make things. They’re practical and reality-based. Bricks don’t care about social-justice warfare.

Sarah Thomas ran the Bodleian Library at Oxford, though she also ran the library at Harvard. I like librarians. They have lots of common sense and don’t say much at meetings, but, aside from commemorative bookplates, do they know anything about memorials? She knows about Bodley.

Elizabeth Alexander has been the president of the Mellon Foundation since 2018. She came from the Ford Foundation, where she ran a program seeking to use art and literature to reduce the African-American prison population. She rebuilt the Yale African-American Studies Department. Before she got there, the department was a fiasco. It’s still an inconsequential place. She knows how to maneuver in a big organization.

She’s a poet, and my dissertation was on a poet, so I’m naturally sympathetic. I watched all of her videos on the Mellon website, where they present her, I assume, at her best. “Hey, guys, pick a great poem,” I thought.

I read her Obama inauguration poem and listened to her when she read it. It’s of the moment, the moment was Obama, Obama’s a bore, and she raised the level. I liked it. I read her New Yorker story, “The Trayvon Generation,” published in July. It’s about her two sons and her fantasy alliance between them, privileged rich kids, and the thug Trayvon Martin. It’s short, and maybe someone wrote it for her. It’s a stringcourse of clichés that make her seem like a mediocrity and a smooth, professional outrage pimp. Her father, Clifford Alexander, was the secretary of the Army in the late 1970s. She’s sitting on billions and peddles fake anger as a profession when she has nothing to be angry about.

It’s not only the president who doesn’t impress. A LACMA trustee (and LACMA is a disaster), a SFMoMA trustee (and SFMoMA is in the middle of a racism furor), the lacrosse scandal at Duke, Goldman Sachs, lots of Yale (and Yale is a blinkered place), and endless Harvard. And Lincoln Center.

Rich, entitled people often make a big mess. That’s why we want a broad cross-section of humanity on our super-rich, tax-exempt boards. The Mellon Foundation president lives off clichés and fake grudges, and the board seems, to me, meddlesome rich people.

Isn’t there someone from Texas or South Dakota or, maybe, Pittsburgh, where the Mellons made the money? And why isn’t the Mellon Foundation and its opulently paid staff headquartered in Pittsburgh? I think the Mellon Shebang should move to Pittsburgh, or a coal county, and try selling their monument revolution there.

This Thanksgiving might be a time to try a new shtick since the victim business is getting tired.