Nick Gillespie’s article in Reason about the failure of artists to provide us with any lasting work about September 11th is very interesting, but I think a few points bear emphasis. First, there is some good art about September 11th—not much, no, but some. In poetry, for example: John M. Ford’s 110 Stories is brilliant (although, sadly, in the book version, the look of the poem is ruined). Raphael Campo has another excellent one in the current issue of Measure. I like Richard Kron’s sculpture, 9/11 Tribute, and even this photo works very well. But it is true that, by and large, the decade since has left us with little memorable or powerful art. That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.
On that point, I strongly agree with Gillespie that the best September 11th memorials we’ve seen so far “are more found art than consciously composed work”—and this is just why what’s going to happen in Shanksville is such a tragedy. Since the attacks, the field in Shanksville has been a site where regular people post pictures, put up markers, leave things—actual people spontaneously mourning for the attacks and honoring the heroism of those on Flight 93. This is particularly powerful because Flight 93 itself was a spontaneous act of heroism by the regular passengers. Placing a big, cold, official monument on the site destroys the entire aesthetic and memorialistic experience.
