The History Of Memorials

"Walking through the Saint-Gaudens exhibition, you feel as if you’ve set the Wayback Machine to an age when great art and national trauma breathed the same air. In the early 21st century—when memorials have more in common with landscape architecture than sculpture and tend to be designed by virtual unknowns, so as to avoid even a hint of controversy—the Saint-Gaudens show reveals how much esthetic rapture, even in mourning, has been displaced by gloomy theoretical posturing. It also reveals just how difficult it has become to think of traditional sculpture and memorials as serving the same goals."