Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 33

the plaza was a product of a sensibility that embraces the prudence and temperance that
are central to the ideals of Civic Virtue, Tilted Arc aggressively intruded into this carefully
constructed order with 20 tons of rolled steel. The post-World War II era had witnessed
these same plazas used as noisy gathering places for protestors demanding more equal
standing for laboring people, women and ethnic minorities in the American social order.
As with Titled Arc, these gatherings focused their attentions upwards towards those
behind the towering glass walls of New York City’s governmental and commercial towers.
The targets of the protestors surely stared down upon them and continued staring as
Tilted Arc transformed the Trade Court’s plaza into one never empty of resistance.
Federal funding brought Tilted Arc into being. It would be reasonable to assume
that a government that funded Tilted Arc was providing tacit encouragement for a social
order markedly different from a government that commissioned an allegory of ‘Civic
Virtue Triumphant Over [the] Unrighteousness’ of lust. This altered power dynamic
between art and political power would endure until the 1980’s, when traditional
American elites would aggressively reassert their values and Tilted Arc would meet a fate
worse than that of Civic Virtue.
If banishing of MacMonnies’ ‘Civic Virtue Triumphant Over Unrighteousness’ was
a consequence of power devolving from traditional Anglo-Saxon elites in New York City
to those groups addressed by the sculpture’s admonitions, the destruction of Tilted Arc
could be seen as cultural power being reasserted by traditional groups, achieving its
apotheosis in the controversy over Piss Christ. ‘
Culture wars are not about culture. The things made by artists, such as
MacMonnies and Serra, are proxies for wider battles between communities that must
coexist but that possess different sets of values. Tilted Arc and Civic Virtue are
manifestations of competing groups asserting their values on the other. Destruction or
exile of objects or images that embody the values of a competing group is the premiere
standard of victory in culture wars, a real life version of ‘Capture the Flag’. Civic Virtue’s
banishment was a product of individuals and communities who felt insulted by the
implication that their natures were fundamentally debased and in need of reformation
and that the McClellans and MacMonnies of the world could point them towards a more
virtuous set of behaviors. When members of these groups assumed the levers of power,
they saw no need to abide MacMonnies or McClellan’s implicit judgments of the moral
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