confederate monuments deserve the same fate as BinLaden

[Coventina]

44. I most certainly am.

Look, artworks are attacked all over the world, and as a person whose profession it is to preserve, analyze, present and document ALL ART this is incredibly frustrating to me.

Enough art gets destroyed through accident, natural disaster, warfare, and natural deterioration. Wanton destruction is just that: wanton destruction.

All we have (going back just one hundred years or so) are fragments that through accident or purpose have been preserved. We try to understand what these objects meant to their original makers and viewers. When all you have are bits and pieces of a visual culture, interpretation gets that much more skewed.

How can we know what people really thought or felt if their visual history is erased? What if 500 years from now, the absence of Confederate monuments makes future historians conclude that those who fought in the Civil War were quickly forgotten?

ISIS is busily attempting to erase all prior civilizations to theirs. Many of the locations I used to teach about early empires have been completely bulldozed into oblivion. They were cruel, horrific societies by Enlightenment standards, but they were the world's earliest. And now they are gone, thanks to ISIS.

The Nazis tried to erase modern art from their society. They destroyed thousands of artworks they considered offensive, morally degenerate, etc.

The Suffragettes in England splashed acid on many "Old Masters," particularly sumptuous female nudes by such greats as Velasquez and Reubens. They were protesting the fact that women were treated as sex objects instead of rational creatures entitled to a political voice.

Many modern works of art are attacked because people react angrily toward them. They don't understand how a huge red canvas with a few white stripes can be art. So they attack it with a knife. Or they throw white paint over a painting they think defames a religious figure.

During the French Revolution resentment toward the Catholic Church led mobs to hack statues to pieces, smash stained glass windows, or sometimes just burn the entire church down (including monuments like the great church of Cluny, one of the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages).

Mobs of angry Protestants destroyed Catholic artwork they considered "idolatrous," including books of history and other learning which are now lost forever.

Lots of people have destroyed art for lots of different reasons, and they all felt justified. Maybe some were more justified than others. But it doesn't change the fact that once it is gone, that history is gone forever. We will always be left with an incomplete picture of what really was - whether it was a beautiful truth or an ugly one.