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In the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington from 1939, Jimmy Stewart plays a pure of heart, small-town scout leader, who unexpectedly becomes a Senator. When he arrives in Washington, DC for the first time, he eagerly tours the city. He takes in one patriotic landmark after another, the monument to Jefferson, the Constitution, until he finally arrives at the Lincoln Memorial. He removes his hat as he walks up the wide stairs and threads his way through vast columns to gaze upon this giant marble Lincoln, thoughtful and seated.
And then a small child begins to haltingly read from an inscription of the Gettysburg Address. Now, we hear highly? We saw. We saw. We saw.
We saw. As the child speaks, Mr. Smith seems to really hear the words. Freedom. Freedom.
He looks back reverentially at Lincoln and his face fills with emotion. He's moved, proud, overcome. This figure hacked out of stone. It's made him feel so much. That's the power of a great statue.
And this summer, we were supposed to get a whole lot more statues, like it. To celebrate America's majestic inheritance yesterday, I signed an executive order to create a brand new monument to our most beloved icons. It's the National Garden of American Heroes. So the Garden of Heroes is one of Trump's many plans for the 250th anniversary of America. Adalanta Arden Miller is an artist and the art director of the British magazine works in progress.
And specifically, it's this big garden where he wants to have life-size sculptures of 250 American heroes. George Washington. Betsy Ross. Davie Crockett. President Ronald Reagan.
The full list includes many Americans you might expect. Abraham Lincoln-level Americans, founding fathers and revolutionary heroes, JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., and Harriet Tubman. It's also not beloved artists, writers, athletes. But it's got a bunch of wild cards, too. Milton Friedman, Shelly Temple, Hannah Arendt, Dr. Seuss.
Julia Child. And the Canadian-born, but naturalized, Alex Trebek. It seems to be like a fairly random grab bag, which I think is, in its own way, actually kind of charming. Plucked famous people after the canon, Lauren Bacal and Humphrey Beibert, why not? You look like not Catherine Hepburn.
Just like some of that. Exactly, exactly. The requirement for the statues is they be realistic and classical and cast in prestigious materials like marble and bronze, like the Lincoln Memorial, only much smaller, just 20% larger than life, and so far more approachable. I think the ideal experience is like you go in, you find the celebrity, and you take a picture next to them. I think the focus on realism is partly so that you can sort of recognize them using these icons.
Like a selfie garden. Yes, like a selfie garden. A selfie garden of America, which in a way is very appropriate. Just picture it. People ambling around the grounds, looking for their faves.
Mean mugging with Johnny Cash pretending to dunk on Kobe Brian, throwing up bunny ears behind Emily Dickinson. Happy birthday, America. There's a few problems though. One is the timeline. It's meant to open on the 4th of July this year.
Trump originally announced the project in 2020. When Joe Biden became president the next year, he canceled it. Trump then brought it back in 2025, at which point it was on a very tight schedule. I think it was originally given a year to happen, which is insane. You have maybe 10 to 20 super skilled super experienced realist sculptures in America, if that.
You have barely any foundries. Like we don't have the industry to produce this kind of thing. Like is this going to happen? No, there's no way this going to happen. Even the Trump administration has conceded that all 250 will not be ready for the nation's big birthday.
Only the first 50 sculptures were due on June 4th of 2026. But as far as anyone can tell, not a single one of those sculptures has materialized. This project is essentially massively behind. It's still an open question. What if anything will be in that part?
It's pretty incredible. We're not just talking about one statue too. We've got a lot that we need to get done. On this, the 250th anniversary of our nation, let it be known that America and Americans are capable of great things. But making lots of statues of people is no longer one of them.
Just like this is so crude. But like straight up, what is our level of artistic sculpting scale? Like imagine a timeline? Like where are we in history right now? I'd say that we are maybe mid-medieval.
We're dark-ages. We're dark-ages, yeah, completely. This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. For millennia, statues have been pinnacles of human creativity and achievement.
And works like the Lincoln Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, the David, still called to people all over the world. And yet we don't make them nearly as much as we used to. And when we do, things need to go wrong. It's not just the Garden of Heroes. In recent years, the news has been full of statues of famous people of that look a mess.
I long assumed that as a species, we were rock-solid at making figurative statues. When I tried to find out if this was really true, the answer was fascinating, but not exactly heartening. The story of sculpture, as you might expect, involves the Greeks and the Romans. But it also involves the Russians and the North Koreans and some lessons on how easy expertise is to lose. So today on Dakota Ring, how did American statues go bust?
Hi, I wanted to let you know that there's a new installment of Dakota Ring's back available right now, exclusively for Dakota Ring plus subscribers. This time I called up one of our listeners, a WNBA super fan who had a question about a very familiar, but not often examined pregame ritual. Why is the National Anthem performed at professional sporting events? You just expect it, right? You go to the game, they perform the National Anthem, but when you step back, you're like, why do we do that?
Why is this done at sporting events? But then other events, it's not. So like, acquire performance at Broadway show, you know, they don't start with, please rise to Honor America. When you really marinate on it, it's pretty random. That episode of Dakota Rings Back is in your feed right now.
But only if you're a Dakota Ring plus member. If you're not a plus member yet, what are you doing? Become one by going to the Coder Ring show page on Apple Podcast or Spotify or visiting slate.com slash decoder ring. We would be extraordinarily appreciative. Thank you.
On to the show. Can we look at the Lucille Ball sculpture together? Yes, that'd be great. Oh wait, sorry, I need to grab your Wi-Fi by the way. Oh sure, here you just look at mine.
OK, great. A couple of weeks ago, Adaland to Art and Miller came into our studio to talk about what has happened to statues. And we started by looking at an example of the kind of statue that's been getting all the attention Lee. Oh wow, that's horrifying. Oh my god.
Oh. The picture Adaland to was looking at is of a 2009 sculpture of Lucille Ball that went up in her hometown in the southwest corner of New York state and promptly made the news. Some people say there's really nothing funny about the Lucille Ball statue. Yeah, critics say this thing is scary. Yes.
It makes her look vaguely possessed. So she's got sort of big puffy cheeks and then very large lips and then very carefully defined teeth, which always looks quite frightening. Oh, and that's not even to mention the hands. I mean, it doesn't look anything like her. No, no, it really doesn't.
And this is just one of many recent statues about what you could say something similar. There's a very new statue of Trump, a literal golden idol that immortalizes his post assassination attempt fist pump and also every wrinkle in his trousers. Looks like they forgot to steam out his pants, his shirt, and his face. And there's a statue of the NBA superstar, Dwayne Wade, in which his skin ripples as if he were in a wind tunnel. I don't know who chiseled this bad boy, but god, Lee.
Yeah, oh my god. It's so bad. There's a bust of the handsome soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo. That's anything but his features are all smushed into the center of his face. It's terrible.
It looks like his face was bended like Beckham. As we were finishing this episode, a monstrous 70 ton statue of Leonardo Messi that looks nothing like him when up in Argentina. And believe me, I could go on, and people have. When have you ever seen a statue and been like, this statue is nice. It looks like who it's of, and I'm not scared by it.
Maybe the golden era of bronze artwork was back in Roman days, right? Maybe we just don't have the skill set. At first, I assumed these viral sculptures were examples of the internet doing its thing, just surfacing the clickiest stuff, and that perfectly fine sculptures abounded, unengaged with. But as more and more popped up, I started to wonder if something more fundamental might be going on. So like, just big picture.
Like, why can't we just make 250 sculptures? Like, why can't we do that? America doesn't have the technical expertise to do this kind of work. I mean, sculpting a figure is really, really hard. Adeline is an artist.
She's primarily a painter now, but she trained as a sculptor, too. So she's speaking from firsthand experience. And I asked her to outline what actually goes into making a marble or bronze statue. She said you typically begin by making a model. Usually you start and play, because you can add bits, and you can remove bits.
And then once you're happy with how that looks, you will usually transfer it into a different medium, so you'll either turn it into marble by using a machine to transfer the sizes and dimensions into the marble block, or if you're just extremely good, like Michelangelo was, instead of direct carve into the marble. But we haven't had people with that kind of skill set for quite a long time now. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is our conception. Like, someone gets a block of marble and just carves it. But that is not how most sculptures, or almost any sculpture, is made like, except for Michelangelo.
If you think about the big, famous American marble sculptures, like Daniel Chester French, Lincoln Memorial, like, he never even touched that sculpture. Like, that was entirely carved by six Italian brothers in the Bronx, you know, from, you know, around the 19th century onwards, but starting a little bit earlier, the process for making marble sculpture is that the artist makes this version in play very carefully, very meticulously, and then it is sort of transferred by these highly skilled workmen into the marble, using this thing called a pointing machine. I actually looked up videos of pointing machines, and I feel like calling them machines gives like the impression that one could use them, if you were just like a regular person.
But it was so clearly like, such highly skilled work. The pointing machine here itself, which is made up with two arms and a crochet, the important arm is the pin that touches here down, both to the point on the model, and the corresponding point on the stone that I'm trying to reach. It was like, if you gave me like a pile of like, protractors and like knitting needles, and was like, make a sculpture from these directions, I'd be like, ah, no, exactly, like these six brothers in the Bronx weren't just a random family, they're like, you know, the Picarelli guys are like, the people to do this kind of work. And when they shot their studio down, you know, there wasn't that quality of work really available elsewhere. So if you're trying to do that kind of work, now, what do you do?
These days, what you're gonna get is like, a machine that chisels it based on computer directions, and then sprays a wash at the same time. And that's how the first sort of layer of most stone sculptures are made, and then you have artisans who come in and do the finishing touches. And what happens if you're working in metal? You take it usually to a foundry, and then they will basically make a mold of your clay sculpture, then they will sort of make a mold of that mold and a more resilient material, and then they will fill it with metal, and depending on how complicated your sculpture is, they will have to make a mold that's maybe two pieces, maybe a hundred pieces, but the key thing is that metal needs to sort of roll everywhere inside the mold while it's hot, but never be too thick, because obviously, they're not like filled with bronze all the way through, partly because it would be way too expensive, but also because when the metal is cooling in the mold, it's going to sort of shrink and move and contract, and if it's one solid bit, all of the fingers are gonna fall off.
There are more details and complications. Someone's got to smooth out where all the metal pieces meet. They got to figure out what the metal should look like, how to patentate it, and on and on. All of this is to say, a bedrock fact of making a statue is that it is exceptionally physically difficult, and there's an added challenge with a realistic statue, especially one that's supposed to look like a famous person. We all know how to judge them.
We all know what they're supposed to look like. Think about it this way. Have you ever seen one of your friends and looked at them and been able to see from their face that they were like really hungover, really tired? Sure. The reason you can see that is because their face looks kind of puffy, right?
It's just like very subtle changes in the surface of their face. Yeah. If you think about how different like puffy eye bags look from like a flat eye bag, that's talking like maybe a millimeter max of difference in a skin height, but you can detect it immediately. We are so incredibly sensitive to the form and shape of faces, and actually historically for almost all of human history, no one's been able to do realistic faces. They're that hard, but despite the difficulties, at some points in human history, we have been able to do it.
If the Greeks came and saw how we looked sculpting today, they think it was kind of cringe embarrassing. So how did the Greeks get so freakin' good at this incredibly difficult task? And how all these years later, we wind up so cringe at it. All that when we come back. For most of the history of professional sports, there was a wall between the game and gambling.
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Please play responsibly. If you or someone you know what what's concerned about gambling, visit connectcentrale.ca or call 1-866-5-1-2600. Terms and conditions apply. You can make a sculpture of just about anything. Wood, plastic, resin, glass, found objects, recycled materials, and you can make them in many styles.
But Trump's proposed Garden of Heroes is calling for a very specific type of sculpture. A life-like, realistic statue of a human being meant to stand on our plinths. And unfortunately for any artist trying to sculpt such a thing, it's always going to be compared to the statuary of the ancient Greeks. Because they're the ones who started making it. Look, there's loads of interesting good sculpture before the Greek stuff.
Sculpture is so important to humans that we did it before we even made like useful clay pottery. Like we have sculptures that are 28,000 years old. We only have shards of usable pottery from 10,000 years. So we invented the synergy. And for 18,000 years, we were just like, yeah, sculpture is definitely the best thing that we can do with fire clay.
But what the Greeks did that was really, really special was do a freestanding figure that was standing on its ankles. It sounds obvious. But if you imagine humans, these big, heavy things, these tiny little fragile ankles, so actually making a figure that doesn't need to be attached to a column or a larger block or a tree stump is a huge deal. And then once the Greeks invented that freestanding figure, it took them like 100 years for that figure to turn his head a bit. And now the other years, they're going to lift his arms up.
And then in only a couple hundred years, you have these like figures moving through three-dimensional space that has never happened before anywhere in any sculpture tradition in the planet. And when is this? So the first freestanding Greek sculpture that has that sort of like, contrapposto, hip thrust, and the head turn is a grittiest boy. And that's around like two ATBC. The Greeks' work was so revolutionary and incredible that even when they begin to lose geopolitical control to the Romans, the Romans wholeheartedly adopt their style.
The Romans add some realism, wrinkles, and jowls, but they otherwise work in a Greek mode, regularly copying Greek sculptures. Most of the times you're seeing a sculpture in a museum, and it sort of has that old, tiny look. It's probably a Roman version of a Greek sculpture, just because the Romans made so many copies of Greek work. All this classical sculpture required artists and artisans, but also many other things besides. Think about all of the stonework that survives from antiquity.
Statues, yes, but also fountains and forums and columns and pediments. To make all this stuff, you need population density and wealth, resources, and job specialization. You need the guy who carved the hair on a statue, and the guy who quarries the rock for it, and also the guy who lugs the rock on roads from one far flung place to another. You need big public spaces to display all this work, and people to protect it from vandals who might want to melt down the bronze or lop off a marble arm. And for centuries, Rome could provide all of this.
Until. The fall of a Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire collapses in the 400s AD, this infrastructure goes away, and the naturalistic sculpture tradition is revealed to be surprisingly precarious. It topples too. And over the course of the next millennium plus, all these skills, more or less vanish.
Art historians always trying to say, like, oh, don't call it the dark ages, but they are really committed to that. They're like, come on, guys, like, OK, so you made some nice brass doors, you made some church bells, you made this one sculpture of a guy on a horse in 175 AD. And then it takes 1,280 years for anyone to make a second guy on a horse sculpture at a bronze. OK. If that's not a tradition, falling away, I don't know what is.
OK, so we have this respectfully dark ages. It's not as brightly lit age. Exactly. Exactly. And then what happened to the hell sculpture again?
Effectively, sculpture only gets good again at Renaissance. I mean, the corny story is basically kind of true. Cities become more popular, people start becoming a bit more prosperous, you've got all these wealthy Italian banker families who are literally living in the ruins of Rome. And they're thinking, oh, the nicer this place was like a little bit less ruined to feel like. And so they start just literally copying the art of the past and trying to make their version to these sculptures.
I mean, within around 100 years, things go from looking pretty medieval to looking pretty naturalistic and amazing again. Donatello makes the first free-standing sculpture since antiquity in the 1440s. It's a David. Michelangelo sculpts his David in the early 1500s, a bona fide masterpiece. John Lorenz O'Burnini, the Baroque master, creates his David, my personal favorite, for what it's worth in the 1620s, along with a number of other sculptures that push the form further.
In one of the statues, a hand grips a thigh so convincingly, it's breathtaking. It's objectively one of the hardest possible things to do in that material. And it's incredible that people figured out how to do it before we had like, clean, reliable drinking water. Right, they turned stone into like the softest, most elegant delicate thing alive. And like, right, we didn't have sewage.
Yes. An art form that had been dead for over 1, 1,000 years, was brought back to life. And once the skills had returned, people were determined to hold onto them. And if you take the large panoramic view of what unfolds in the coming centuries, it's that holding on so tightly, so rigidly, to this tradition of classical realistic sculpture, it's ironically eventually going to help lead to its downfall, to the state of statues today. It happens something like this.
By the 19th century on the industrial age, the center of the art world had moved from Italy to Paris, and would-be sculptors are now expected to undergo a rigorous school-based art education, the most prestigious of which is provided at the Accol de Bozar in Paris. So if you want to be able to graduate as a sculptor, you have to be able to do this incredibly difficult task. So they'll say to you, you know, you have to be able to model and play in a couple of hours like a realistic, Corinthian column, a nude figure, do it without any reference, do it off from your head. So the standards of training are really high. Like, it's the hardest art school has ever been.
Like, it's the worst student in that class, we would be like, they're amazing. And there are influences spelled well beyond Paris. The Bozar style and training becomes dominant all over Europe. And in the US, where our artists are otherwise kind of lagging. They're like, wow, Europe really has it going on.
Right. And so basically, the way that you educate it as an American artist in the 19th century was either by going to Europe yourself or training from someone who had been. And so all of our big monument artists like Daniel Chester French went to study over there and then came back to the reproduced versions of Europe for America. America's most famous sculpture, the Statue of Liberty, is famously a French gift designed by a French sculptor. It was erected in New York Harbor in 1886.
Pretty soon after, Brooklyn got its own Arc de Triomphe. But America did start to get some more homegrown statues, too. The 1890s marked the beginning of a three decade period that scholars have described as a golden age of American public monuments. Thousands of sculptures, many of them commemorating the Civil War on both sides, went up across the country. In so far, as American urban life is still full of monuments.
In so far, as you can think of sculptures of guys on horses in your hometown, most come from this period. But as good and technically skilled as many of these are, a lot of them are also kind of dull. I know I've seen a lot of statues of guys on horses in my life, but I can't say I recall almost any of them in particular. Because what happened in the 19th century was a sort of great Blanding where the art schools pumped out these thousands and thousands of really technically skilled artists, none of whom we've heard of today, because they all made really boring stuff. What you're saying is almost like they're so technically professional but sort of like a disassociated from the feeling of it and it just gets like a kind of professional perfection.
Exactly. I think it's very striking that the art from that century that people still engage with is things like impressionism and post-impressionism, things like Van Gogh. All of these movements are movements that were explicitly against the dominant form of art, which was like the French Academy and Neo-Classicism. But in a way, the reason the impressionists are so good is partly because they grew up and often trained in a culture where standards are really high. So I think if you want to have really good, you're going to be changing art.
A sort of useful system is like everyone's trained to a very high level and they also have a kind of monolithic aesthetic against which they're about. It's not just the painters who rebel. The French sculptor August Rodin, who was trained in the way that we're talking about, he pushes back to, he pushes back against neoclassical perfection. He makes fragments, torsos and hands and says these are sculptures, they're finished. He forsakes idealized emotions.
He shows his work, he puts his literal fingerprints in the clay models and they end up in the bronze sculptures too. And this rebellious spirit, one that pushes back against formal standards if they're boring and rigid. It becomes what we expect great artists to have. We expect them to follow their own rules, to see the world afresh, to make it new. So what happens in the 20th century is basically that the idea of modernism wins.
So the idea that the artists should be expressing their individual belief through the art. So art becomes much more sort of pluralistic. You have loads of different styles. You don't have a single big academy. But also after the First World War, a bunch of artists say, you know, we can't keep working in this style, which is all about beauty and unity and naturalism, because our world is pretty messed up right now, and that just doesn't represent the world.
We want to work in a modernist style, which feels like it's actually representing the kind of fracturing and breaking and twisting that is relevant to our psyche. And this sounds like classical, traditional, beautiful work was not capturing the moment that it was stuck in the past, only gets heightened when the Nazis rise to power. I think the thing that puts the nail in the coffin for realism being the mainstream art movement is in a way the sort of historical success of the Degenerate art show. The Degenerate art show was an exhibition staged by the Nazis in 1937, meant to educate the German public on the supposed dangers and decadence of avant-garde, modernist, and abstract art.
It contains 650 works by artists like Max Ernst, Otto Dex, Paul Clay, Mark Chagall, and Pablo Picasso. All condemned by the states as Jews, Bolsheviks, perverts, or all of the above. It had the character of a show trial. This is the art historian Robert Hughes in the 1993 documentary about the Degenerate art show. Very different matter just to say, well, this is a bunch of rubbish done by Jews and gypsies and culturally hideous, and that get rid of it.
The important thing is that people should agree with you, that they should see it for themselves, with their own eyes, and then conclude that it's rubbish. The Nazis also staged another show that year, meant to be its mirror. It was called the Great German Art Exhibition. It was full of art approved by the regime, art that was realistic. The art must be elevated.
It must be classical. I suppose you could say, yeah, it's pools and Greeks and naked broads. But when Hitler lost the war, it was these so-called Degenerate artists who stayed with us. All of the famous artists all from that show, we have not heard of basically anyone from the sort of approved Nazi show. And that's partly because the Degenerate art show had really creative, art guard, interesting artists.
But it's also because the artists who were in the Nazi show were Nazis, and we don't want Nazis in our canon. So obviously, those artists aren't going to be people who future art students are looking at for inspiration. So the whole association in the 20th century was that if you're interested in neo-classical, majestic, beautiful, striding figures with big muscles, that seems extremely sus. It's a little Nazi. It's a little Nazi.
It's a little Stalinist. But these are not ideas you want to be associated with. If you want to be associated with freedom, you're going to make art that looks like the avant-garde work. So at this moment, then the wars have happened. They've fractured our faith that neo-classical forms are really communicating what's most important or most urgent.
And simultaneously, the people who are championing them are like dictators. Yes. And so artists, fully from, I don't want to be doing the stuff that the Nazis and Stalin are into. Exactly. Realism has not recovered from being associated with fascism and the worst excesses of communism.
And so as it goes out of style, we basically just stop teaching in school. So then we do, so we stop teaching it. Students start literally smashing all the plaster casts of the antique sculptures so that it can't even be taught in the future. Right, it's clear throughout the night. As rampaging students declare their violent storm of the establishment.
Partly as a symbol of this isn't the kind of art school you want to be at. We don't want to be learning the great Greco-Roman new tradition. And if you smash these things, you can't teach it to us anymore. But it's also that it seems so irrelevant. What's it going to be useful for in the future?
So in the West, does skill get kind of corny? What happens in the West? Skill gets totally corny. The way art school works now. The assumption is there's no interest in learning sort of traditional sculpture skills.
And therefore, there are no teachers or employees to teach it. And once you've sort of broken up chain of teaching, it's really hard to recreate it. Just to be clear here, it's not that the 20th century is lacking in innovative and impressive sculpture. But it's most esteemed and successful sculptors. Think Brancusi, Bourgeois, Jacometi, Moore, Coons do not make traditional realist work.
It's out of fashion, as Adalanda learned through her own art school experience. Adalanda loved drawings since she was a child. She's always been attracted to the high scale realist work of the Renaissance and been unusually serious about it. She tried to drop out of school when she was 14 to seek out a 19th century-style art education. So when I got to art as an undergraduate student, I thought, oh, this is amazing.
I'm going to be able to learn all these things. But my program, most art schools, was basically entirely conceptual. So I didn't have any practical classes in terms of how do you learn how to paint better. You just have studio time when you figure it out by yourself. And then you have crypt classes where you gather with artists or other students who are all doing totally different things.
And then you just talk about your project for an hour. When I had my first tutorial in undergrad, with a professor I've been assigned, they said, oh, I'm a photographer. So you can actually paint better than I can. So I can't really help you with that aspect of things. So I think it'll only help you think about it.
Yeah. And I'm thinking, the thinking is good, I'd really like to be able to make the trees look a bit more treish. Like, what if you want to make something? Who helps you make something? Like, artists don't make things.
The funny irony of the contemporary art schools that if you want to learn how to make something, the person you usually go to is the shop tech, like the woodworking guy. And often this person will have actually maybe they've worked in like a Hollywood prop shop or something like that. The artistry of getting these dinosaurs to look real is absolutely the most important first step. It's a bit of an implication to say that like, skill was lost. What actually happened was that the kind of artistic skill we're talking about migrated where it was needed, which was Hollywood and the entertainment art.
So you still have people doing amazing sculptures in the late middle 20th century, but they're doing them as scary monster props for Jurassic Park. And that's where the skills preserved. We were actually using techniques that were developed hundreds and hundreds of years ago by sculptures of large bronzes and such. But those Hollywood pop shop, like the goals, the aesthetic of that world is fairly different than like high art sculpture. Yes.
Ultimately, Adalanda was so frustrated and not being taught practical skills, she dropped out of her undergraduate art program. When she found her way back to school, she decided to study sculpture, realist sculpture, something she picked up in part because it was so out of fashion. Because when I was doing my undergrad, everyone told me, you know, she make easel paintings, you're sort of bourgeois set outs and you hate the people and you're just commercial and you're a loser. But the idea of doing realist sculpture was like so beyond the pale, they hadn't even bothered telling me not to do it. Adalanda loved that kind of sculpting, and she might still be doing it if it didn't take up so many more resources and space than painting.
All of the sculptures that I hadn't sold, I had to heave to a skip because I couldn't sort of my apartment. They're like too big. So I got like one of these art films, works in New York City, and one of them doesn't. Her story is a microcosm of what's happened to figurative sculpture in the West. Not only is it really hard to do, and art then necessitates intensive training, incredible skill and vast resources, it's also considered conservative and retrograde and has been for nearly a hundred years.
I'm not saying it's impossible to find an excellent naturalistic sculptor and foundries to support them in America right now, let alone in Italy. You absolutely can. And in fact, in recent decades, there has been a concerted effort called the Atelier Movement to revive these capabilities. Nevertheless, the number of practitioners and the overall level of skill are both far lower than they once were. And that's why America can't immortalize 250 of our most legendary citizens in a hurry for our birthday this year.
But just because we can't pull it off, doesn't mean no one can. Oh fuck, that's why I'm not. When we return, why if Trump is serious about getting a whole lot of Ron's statues done on a tight timeline, his best bet might be to ask for help from Kim Jong Un. Okay. At Capital One, we don't just use technology.
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Understood the big bet? Find us on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. So in the West and America in particular, realist sculpture has been tied up like much realism with authoritarianism. But there are some places where these ideological connotations haven't been so damning, where a garden of heroes would be pretty easy to pull off. America has so few figurative sculptures, so when you want these kind of sculptures, they're often commissioned from China or from North Korea.
So like, if we wanted this to come off in a timeline that was allotted, we would have essentially had to like import our garden of American heroes from China. Yes, both of them could do it great. As wild as that may sound, think about all we've said. Do have monumental figurative sculpture? You need devoted state capacity and to not have besmirched realism.
And it helps not to shy away from venerating exalted leaders. So what is the North Korea situation? Like they have a giant centralized art factory. How can you tell me about how they make the stuff there? So North Korea has the world's biggest single art fabrication place called Mansele Art Studio.
Mansele is the top of the panopies, so it's a very beautiful, very beautiful, very beautiful, very beautiful, very beautiful. And they do all sorts of art things there, but what they're known for is enormous sculpture. We're talking, you know, 50 to 120 feet tall. They basically get commissioned in the state. They say we want Kim, 120 feet tall with his arm raised.
North Korea unveiled giant statues of its former leaders, Kim Il-Song and Kim Jong-il on Friday as new leader Kim Jong-un walked out, waving to tens of thousands of people covering the slopes of Pyongyang's Mansele Hill. They have lots of different parts. So often if you see sculptures they make, they'll actually copy the same body, and they'll just like switch the heads or switch the hands or use the same trousers that sort of sculpt a new jacket and they get fabricated and they go out. And where are they? They've sent sculptures all over the world.
So the most famous one they've exported is called the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar in Sanigo. And it's a man, woman and child that's kind of striding up a mountain into the sky. At 52 meters high, the monument is taller than the Statue of Liberty. It called for 222 tons of copper, three years of hard work and costs 26 million euros. Its creators hope people will come in droves.
There's like 15, 20 African nations capability. I mean, Germany has a fountain that have been manufactured in North Korea. Yeah, if you don't have a lot of money, it's a great place to go. I mean, it's illegal, but that also gets you a good deal. Is there the know how to make like a monumental sculpture?
Like anywhere else, and they just have the most. For the price, they're the best, but actually Chinese race, it's kind of stuff that's just more expensive. Also, it's Chinese, more high tech. So they have all of these amazing, really complex computer programs to like model how the wind will hit it and how to make it strong in various ways. So they do incredible fabrication stuff.
And that's how loads of contemporary art is made these days. A lot of the really big American artists will have big studios in China where their work is made. In addition to North Korea and China, another place realist sculpture skills are still widespread is Russia. And it's not hard to see why these three countries in particular would be so interested in producing this kind of art. If you're a country that wants to impose a certain kind of state power, realism is a great way to do that.
It's a very effective way of communicating the message and therefore it's what's taught. In Russia and China in particular, the realist teaching tradition wasn't disrupted in the mid 20th century, the way it was in the West. And art students are still put through training programs nearly as rigorous as 19th century Parisian art schools. It's actually this really amazing living time capsule. And I think it's actually because they still imagine art and art training to be as something where the first thing you do is you build a technique and then maybe the creativity comes later.
So if you're trying to get into the top Chinese art academy, the way that you apply is you're sitting this hall with hundreds of other students and you have to make a life drawing and a painting and a teacher will sort of, everyone will lay theirs out and the teacher will go along and they're literally just looking for sort of technical skill and then the ones who have the sort of high enough technical skill set gets to go into the school. And at that point they might be asked to sort of develop more of their personal vision bit more, but you know, it's kind of like unless you can meet a certain standard of realism, you're not even really invited to play the game at certain schools. And another key difference is those schools start their students, very young. You know, in North Korea they will pick the kids who they think about as a talent by around age five, about the time they're age 10, they're doing eight hours a day of specialist art training along with their regular schooling.
In Russia, if you want to become even just a painting and a conservator, you need to go into a Russian state academy from age 10 onwards and do a whole art training before you can even touch North-Mastic Canvas. Well, I mean, you're describing it in terms of really resonating with athleticism. Like we're used to the Russians, they're so good at the Olympics because they are found at a very young age and start doing gymnastics. I mean, we do that in America too. But you're saying basically like to be a sculptor or a world-house painter, that body knowledge is really important.
Yeah, and to be clear, I'm talking about doing realistic work. You know, they understand that if you want someone to reach a really high level of technical expertise, you need to do the same thing for art that you do for sports, while you train them very early quite consistently. Like literally because it's like you're using your hands. You need to like build up muscle memory. And we think this is so obvious for sport.
But when I say this about art, people are really surprised as if art is something that you do by just like thinking about it as opposed to using your fingers. Well, I mean, because we conceptually we think of art as an idea process. We don't think of it quite as a thing you're doing with your body all the time. And what you're saying is, well, there's a lot of skills you get from doing your body all the time. Exactly, like the really embarrassing thing about being a painter is that what you're doing is fundamentally not intellectual.
Like I have my little brush which is covered in hair and then I mush it in my little ground-up rock pigments and then I rub it on my flat piece of cloth. And like I can have the best ideas in the world. But at the end of the day what people actually look at is like the motions which I've rubbed at that hairy brush on the cloth. So if all of this is why 200 plus sculptures of American legends could perhaps have been made somewhere other than America, it's not all bad. It's good that we're not North Korea.
It's good that Nazis are still so stigmatized we don't want to make art like them. It's good, our government does not set our artistic goals and objectives. And you can understand why we might prioritize creativity, life experience, ideas, fun, personal vision and passion over the high fidelity conveyance of technical craft to young children. If you think about it this way, maybe it's a good sign. We can't execute Trump's vision for a garden of heroes.
Maybe we should be proud that when our would-be dear leader asks for a bunch of retro sculptures to make a tourist attraction, most of our artists have put their hearts and minds and fingers to accomplishing something else. The tricky thing is, as politicized as statues may be, we can all appreciate them. Who can deny the beauty and majesty of a classical sculpture? Who can deny that when you really want to immortalize someone, whether it's Lucille Ball or a New York Nick or Cristiano Ronaldo or sure, Alex Trebek, statues still seem the best way to do it. Even if we no longer have the chaps, people tend to think, oh, there's no way these skills have really been lost.
They just not pop here anymore. And then when you see something like a culture that genuinely wants a really good sculpture of Dwayne Wade and they can't produce it, then people sort of realize, oh, god, we actually have lost something here. I mean, look, I say this, I'm an artist, look, my friends are artists. I love that there's good stuff going on. The problem is that we've had this idea since modernism that if you teach people how to work in a certain style, say the style of realistic painting, it will crush their creativity and they can't do their own thing.
But I think there are two different ways creativity gets crushed. One is having the style enforced on you and not being allowed to think for yourself. But then the other way is having ideas that you can't execute and therefore being confined to only being able to do the kind of stuff that you sort of figured out how to do as a kid. And I think that ideally we should teach people as much as they want to learn and then they can sort of do what they want with it. And if they want to keep painting realistic, that's fine.
If they want to do something totally different, they can also do that. I find this so interesting and it just rhymes so much with so much that's happening in the world right now. This idea of like, if we don't use our skills, if we don't teach those skills, like, it's not just like those skills will remain, even if we have artifacts that suggest human civilization to those things in the past. Like, if we don't keep doing those things with our bodies and our minds, like, we can become less skilled. Yes.
Because it's the AI thing, right? It's like, if we don't keep thinking or writing or making sculptures, we literally just will get worse than things. Skill is user-taught, Lisa. And it's been very obvious across the century in the last one that like, if you didn't teach these things, they didn't magically stay in the water. This is Decoder Ring.
I'm Willa Paskin. Please consider signing up for Decoder Ring Plus. You get to skip all the ads and listen to episodes of Decoder Ring's back. Our latest is about why the national anthem is a staple of sporting events in particular. You can hear it all by going to the Decoder Ring Show Page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visiting slate.com slash Decoder Ring Plus.
This episode was written by me. It was produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by Josh Levine and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Mary Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Our intern is VD Mulder.
I want to thank Works in Progress, the magazine at Atlanta Works War. If you like Decoder Ring, you will like Works in Progress, which is curious about so many fascinating things. And that has a podcast of its own, where actually heard Atlanta talking about sculpture, I knew I wanted to talk to her some more. We'll link it to that episode and Works in Progress on our show page. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at Decoder Ring at slate.com or call us at 347-460-7281.
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