We Are Monumentally Bad at Statues

Speaker A: This is Hannah Burner from Gigli Squad. Opill is the first over the counter daily birth control pill available in the us. Let's be real. Getting a birth control prescription is not always easy. And it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work class or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now Opill is putting birth control in our control. Opill is a daily birth control that's FDA approved, full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers. No prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out OPill to see if it's right for you. Use code GIGGLY for 25 off your first month of OPill at O-P-I-L-L.com that's code GIGGLY p-I l l.com birth control in your control. We love to see it.

Speaker B: This episode is sponsored by Back Market I've been thinking lately about Often we treat technology as dispos. Not because our devices stop working, but because we're constantly being told there's something newer, faster, better just around the corner. And honestly, if you're shopping for tech right now, whether it's for back to school season work or just because your laptop is finally showing its age, that cycle can get expensive. That's one reason I like what Back Market is doing. Back Market is the leading global marketplace for refurbished tech. Every device they sell has been professionally inspected, tested and restored by professionals. So you're not just taking a chance on an old device. You're getting tech that's been through a rigorous quality process and is backed by what they call the Back Market promise. That means every purchase comes with a one year warranty and 30 day return policy, which takes a lot of the uncertainty out of buying refurbished. And because Back Market tech can cost up to 50% less than buying new, you'll be able to get a higher quality device without stretching your budget and without filling a Landfill. Visit backmarket.com or download the Back Market app to shop now.

Speaker C: 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 D.C. for the first time, he 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 that we hear highly. Resolve, resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. As the child speaks, Mr. Smith seems to really hear the words. He looks back reverentially at Lincoln and his father. 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

Speaker D: it to celebrate America's majestic inheritance. Yesterday I signed an executive order to create a brand new monument to our most beloved icons, the National Garden of American Heroes.

Speaker E: So the Garden of Heroes is one of Trump's many plans for the 250th anniversary of America.

Speaker C: Atalanta Arden Miller is an artist and the art director at the British magazine Works in Progress.

Speaker E: And specifically, it's this big garden where he wants to have life size sculptures of 250American heroes.

Speaker D: George Washington, Betsy Ross, Davy Crockett, President Ronald Reagan.

Speaker C: 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 got beloved artists, writers, athletes, but it's got a bunch of wild cards too.

Speaker E: Milton Friedman, Shirley Temple, Hannah Arendt, Dr.

Speaker C: Seuss, Julia Child, and the Canadian born but naturalized Alex Trebek.

Speaker E: It seems to be like a fairly random grab bag, which I think is in its own way, actually kind of charming. He just like plucked famous people out of the canon, you know, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Burgott. Why not?

Speaker C: Yeah, like. But not Katharine Hepburn. Just like some of them.

Speaker E: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker C: The requirement for the statues is they be realistic and classical and cast in prestigious materials like. And bronze, like the Lincoln Memorial, only much smaller. Just 20% larger than life and so far more approachable.

Speaker E: 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 and use them as icons.

Speaker C: Like a selfie garden.

Speaker E: Yes, like a selfie garden. A selfie garden of America, which in a way is very appropriate.

Speaker C: Just picture it. People ambling around the grounds looking for their faves. Mean mugging with Johnny Cash, pretending to dunk on Kobe Bryant, throwing up bunny ears behind Emily Dickinson. Happy birthday, America. There's a few problems, though. One is the timeline it's meant to

Speaker E: open on the Fourth of July this year.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: I think it was originally given a year to happen, uh, which is insane. You have maybe 10 to 20 super skilled, super experienced realist sculptors in America, if that. We have barely any foundries. Like, we don't have the industry to produce this kind of thing.

Speaker C: Like, is this going to happen?

Speaker E: No, there's no way this can happen.

Speaker C: 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 park.

Speaker B: It's pretty incredible.

Speaker C: We're not just talking about one statue too.

Speaker F: I mean, we've got.

Speaker C: That would 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, like, artistic sculpting skill? Like, imagine a timeline.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker C: Like, where are we in history right now?

Speaker E: I'd say that we are, uh, maybe mid med medieval.

Speaker C: We're Dark Ages.

Speaker E: We're Dark Ages, yeah, completely.

Speaker C: This is decoder 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 call 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 seem to go wrong. It's not just the garden of heroes. In recent years, the news has been full of statues of famous people that look a, uh, mess. I long assumed that as a species, we were rock solid at making figurative statues. But 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 decoder Ring, how did American statues go bust? Hi. I wanted to let you know that there's a new installment of Decoder Rings Back, available right now exclusively for Decoder Ring plus subscribers. This time, I called up one of our listeners, a WNBA superfan who had a question about a very familiar but not often examined pre game ritual.

Speaker G: 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 a choir performance, a Broadway show, you know, they don't start with please rise to honor America when you really marinate on it. It's pretty random.

Speaker C: That episode of Decoder Rings Back is in your feed right now, but only if you're a Decoder Ring plus member. If you're not a plus member yet, what are you doing? Become one by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visiting slate.com/decoder ring. We would be extraordinarily appreciative. Thank you. On with the show. Can we look at the Lucille Ball sculpture together?

Speaker E: Yes, that would be great. Oh, wait, sorry. I need to grab your WI fi, by the way.

Speaker C: Oh, sure. Here, you can just look at mine.

Speaker E: Okay, great.

Speaker C: A couple of weeks ago, Atalanta Arden 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 lately.

Speaker E: Oh, wow, that's. That's horrifying.

Speaker H: Um.

Speaker E: Oh, my God.

Speaker D: Oh.

Speaker C: The picture Atalanta 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, and it makes her look vaguely possessed.

Speaker E: So she's got sort of, um, 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.

Speaker C: I mean, it doesn't look anything like her.

Speaker E: No, no, it really doesn't.

Speaker C: And this is just one of many recent statues about which 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 Dwyane Wade in which his skin ripples as if he were in a wind tunnel.

Speaker F: I don't know who chiseled this bad boy, but golly, yeah.

Speaker E: Oh my God, it's so bad.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: It looks like his face was bended like Beckham.

Speaker C: As we were finishing this episode, a monstrous 70 ton statue of Lionel Messi that looks nothing like him went 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.

Speaker F: Maybe the, the golden era of, uh, bronze art artwork was back in the Roman days, right? Maybe we, maybe we just not. We just don't have the skill set.

Speaker C: 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?

Speaker E: America doesn't have the technical expertise to do this kind of work. I mean, sculpting a figure is really, really hard.

Speaker C: Adelant 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.

Speaker E: Usually you start in play because you can, you know, 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 sort of transfer the sizes and dimensions into the marble block, or if you're just like extremely good, like Michelangelo was, you can just sort of direct carve into the marble. But we haven't had people with that kind of skill set for quite a long time now.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is conception. Like someone gets a block of marble and just carves it. But that is not how most sculptures or almost any sculptures are made. Except for Michelangelo.

Speaker E: If you think about like 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 clay 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.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: The pointing machine here itself, which is made up of 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.

Speaker C: 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, uh, no.

Speaker E: Exactly. And these six brothers from the Bronx weren't just a random family. They're like, you know, the Picarelli guys are the people to do this kind of work. And when they shut their studio down, there wasn't that quality of work really available elsewhere.

Speaker C: So if you're trying to do that kind of work now, what do you do these days?

Speaker E: What you're going to get is a machine that chisels it based on computer directions and then sprays water at the same time. And that's how the first sort of layer, uh, of most stone sculptures are made. And then you have artisans who come in and do the sort of finishing touches.

Speaker C: And what happens if you're working in

Speaker E: metal, you take it, usually to a foundry, and then they will basically make a mould of your clay sculpture. Uh, then they will sort of make a mould of that mould in 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 mould that's maybe two pieces, maybe 100 pieces. But the key thing is that the metal needs to sort of roll everywhere inside the mould 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 mould, it's going to sort of shrink and move and contract. And if it's one solid bit, all of the fingers are going to fall off.

Speaker C: There are more details and complications. Someone has got to smooth out where all the Metal pieces meet. They got to figure out what the metal should look, how to patinate 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.

Speaker E: 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 or really tired? Sure. Like, the reason you can see that is because their face looks kind of puffy. Right. Like, it's just, like, very subtle changes in the surface of their face.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker E: 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 the skin height, but you can detect it immediately. Like, 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.

Speaker C: They're that hard. But despite the difficulties, at some points in human history, we have been able to do it.

Speaker E: If the Greeks came and saw how we were sculpting today, they'd think it was kind of cringe and embarrassing.

Speaker C: So how did the Greeks get so freaking good at this incredibly difficult task? And how all these years later did we wind up so cringe at it all that when we come back, There's just about nothing and nowhere you spend more time than your bed. I recently got a Leesa mattress for my bed, and it's great. I'm a firm mattress maniac. And because this Leesa is a hybrid, a Sapira chill hybrid, it has foam and spring, so it's both soft and firm enough to suit me. And I would guess you too, because Lisa has a lineup of different mattresses tailored to how different sleepers sleep. Take into account sleep positions and feel preferences. They have a Leesa sleep quiz that helps you find the mattress that's right for you in just two minutes or less. The mattresses are all designed and assembled here in the United States, and they have free shipping, easy returns, and 120 night sleep trial. They've also been awarded best hybrid and best memory foam mattresses by the New York Times Wirecutter. So to get your own, go to Leesa.com for 30% off mattresses for the July 4th sale, plus an extra $50 off with the prom Decoder Exclusive for our listeners. That's le.com promo code decoder for 30% off plus an extra $50 off and where you use our code, you're supporting our show. Lisa.com promo code decoder Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials. Stuff that isn't going to make you hot and sweaty. You want pieces that feel good the moment you put them on and look good too. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's a rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. They have a bunch of open collar linen shirts I've been wearing when the temperature creeps up, which is basically all the time now. I think their workout Flow Knit is like great for working out and also great for just walking around. And they have some casual but nice dresses that are good for the weather too. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quint.com decoder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com decoder for free shipping and 365 day return. Quince.com decoder.

Speaker F: Agents are getting smarter every day, but even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into into infrastructure developers can build on what sets Notion's developer platform apart. The collaborative workspace and the platform you build on are the same thing, and unlike other single player platforms, Notion is built for teams with permissions, visibility and governance from day one. Plus, it's easy to use. CLI authenticates in one line and with a cloud based zero infrastructure path, you can just write your code, deploy and you're done. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion.comacast that's all lowercase letters notion.comacast to try Notion's developer platform today notion.comacast.

Speaker C: 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 lifelike realistic statue of a human being meant to stand on a plinth 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.

Speaker E: Look, there is loads of interesting, good sculpture before the Greek stuff. Sculpture is so important to humans that we did it before we even made 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 this technology and then for 18,000 years we were just like, yes, sculpture is definitely the best thing that we can do with fire clay. But what the Greeks did that was really, really, really special was do a freestanding figure that was standing on its ankles. It sounds obvious, but if you imagine like humans, these big heavy things and we have these like 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 a hundred years for that figure to like, like turn his head a bit. Another hundred years for him to lift his arms up. And then within only a couple hundred years, you have these figures moving through three dimensional space. That has never happened before anywhere in any sculpture tradition in the planet.

Speaker C: And when is this?

Speaker E: So the first freestanding Greek sculpture that has that sort of like contrapposto hip thrust and the head turn is the Critias boy. And that's around like 280 BC.

Speaker C: 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

Speaker E: Greek mode, regularly copying Greek sculptures most of the time. If you're seeing a sculpture in a museum and it sort of has that old timey look, it's probably a Roman version of a Greek sculpture. Just because the Romans made so many copies of Greek works, all this classical

Speaker C: 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 carves the hair on a statue and the guy who quarries the rock for it. And also the guy who, 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 the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire collapses in the 400s, Adam, 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.

Speaker E: Art historians are always trying to say, like, oh, don't call it the Dark

Speaker C: Ages, but they are really committed to that.

Speaker E: They're like, come on, guys. Okay, so you made some nice brass doors. You made some church bells. You made this one sculpture of, like, a guy on a horse in, like, 175 A.D. and then it takes 1,280 years for anyone to make a second guy on a horse sculpture out of bronze.

Speaker G: Okay.

Speaker E: You know, like, if that's not a tradition falling away, I don't know what is.

Speaker C: Okay, so we have this respectfully. Dark Ages. Not as brightly lit ages.

Speaker E: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker C: And then what happens? And how does sculpture get good again?

Speaker E: Effectively, sculpture only gets good again at the Renaissance. Uh, I mean, the corny story is basically kind of true. Like, you know, cities become more popular, uh, people start becoming a bit more prosperous. You've got all these, like, wealthy Italian banker families who are literally living in the ruins of Rome, and they're thinking, like, oh, it'd be nice if this place was, like, a little bit less ruined feeling. And so they start, you know, just literally, like, copying the art of the past and trying to make their versions of these sculptures. I mean, within around 100 years, things go from looking, like, pretty medieval to looking, like, pretty naturalistic and amazing again.

Speaker C: Donatello makes the first freestanding sculpture since antiquity in the 1440s. It's a David. Michelangelo sculpts his David in the early 1500s, a bona fide masterpiece. John Lorenzo Bernini, 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 his statues, a hand grips a thigh so convincingly. It's breathtaking.

Speaker E: 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 you had, like, you know, clean, reliable drinking water.

Speaker C: Right. They turned stone into, like, the softest, most elegant, delicate thing alive. And, like. Right. We didn't have sewage.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker C: An art form that had been dead for over a thousand 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, is 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 happened something like this. M by the 19th century and 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 Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Speaker E: So if you want to be able to graduate as a sculptor, you have to be able to do these incredibly difficult tasks. 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 all from your head. So the standards of training are really high. Like it's the hardest art school has ever been.

Speaker C: Like, is the worst student in that class.

Speaker E: We would be like, they're amazing.

Speaker C: And their influence is felt well beyond Paris. The Beaux Arts style and training becomes dominant all over Europe and in the US where our artists are otherwise kind

Speaker E: of lagging, they're like, wow, Europe really has it going on, right? And so basically the way that you were educated as an American artist in the 19th century was either by going to Europe yourself or training from someone who had been. So all of our big, ah, monument artists like Daniel Chester French went to study over there and then came back to sort of reproduce versions of Europe for America.

Speaker C: 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. Insofar as American urban life is still full of monuments, insofar 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

Speaker E: what happened in the 19th century was a sort of great blanding where the art schools pumped out these, you know, thousands and thousands of really technically skilled artists, none of whom we've heard of today, because they all made really boring stuff.

Speaker C: What you're saying is almost like they're so technically proficient, but it's sort of disassociated from the feeling of it, and it just gets a kind of professional, perfect sheen.

Speaker E: 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, ah, movements that were explicitly against the dominant form of art, which was like the French Academy and neoclassicism. Uh, but in a way, the reason the Impressionists are so good is partly because they grew up and were often trained in a culture where the standards are really high. So I think if you want to have really good, really interesting art, a, uh, sort of useful system is like, everyone's trained to a very high level. And then they also have a kind of monolithic aesthetic against which to rebel.

Speaker C: It's m. Not just the painters who rebel. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who was trained in the way that we're talking about, he pushes back too. 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, uh, 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.

Speaker E: So what happens in the 20th century is basically that the idea of modernism wins. So the idea that the artist should be expressing their individual beliefs through the art. So art becomes much more sort of pluralistic. You have loads of different styles. You don't have a sort of 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. You know, a modernist style, which feels like it's actually representing the kind of fracturing and breaking and twisting that is relevant to our psyche.

Speaker C: And this sense that 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.

Speaker E: 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.

Speaker C: 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 Dix, Paul Klee, Mark Chagall and Pablo Picasso, all condemned by the states as Jews, Bolsheviks, perverts or all of the above.

Speaker D: It had the character of a show trial.

Speaker C: This is the art historian Robert hughes in a 1993 documentary about the Degenerate Art Show.

Speaker D: Very different matter. Just to say, well this is a bunch of rubbish done by Jews and gypsies and it's culturally hideous and let's get rid of 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.

Speaker C: The Nazis also staged another show that year meant to be its mirror. It was called the Great German Art Exhibition and it was full of art approved by the regime. Art that was realistic.

Speaker D: The art must be elevated, it must be classical. Uh, I suppose you could say, yeah, uh, it's bulls and Greeks and naked broads.

Speaker C: But when Hitler lost the war, it was these so called degenerate artists who stayed with us.

Speaker E: All of the famous artists are 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, you know, really creative, avant garde, 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 were interested in sort of neoclassical, majestic, beautiful, striding figures with big muscles, you know, that seems extremely sus.

Speaker C: It's a little Nazi.

Speaker E: Ish. It's a little Nazi, it's a little Stalinist. You know, 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.

Speaker C: Mhm. So at this moment then, sort of like the wars have happened, they've fractured our faith that like neoclassical forms are really communicating what's most important or most urgent and simultaneously the people who are championing them are like dictators.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker C: And so artists sort of like flee from. They're like, I don't want to be doing the stuff the Nazis and Stalin are into.

Speaker E: Exactly. Realism has not recovered from being associated with fascism and the worst excesses of communism.

Speaker C: And so as it goes out of style, we basically just stop teaching it in school.

Speaker E: Not only do we stop teaching it, students start literally smashing up all the plaster casts of the antique sculptures so that like, it can't even be taught in the future.

Speaker C: Riots flared throughout the night as, ah, rampaging students declared their violent scorn of

Speaker E: 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 we 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?

Speaker C: So in the west, does skill get kind of corny, like what happens in

Speaker E: the West, Skill gets totally corny. The way art school works now, the assumption is that there's no interest in learning sort of traditional sculpture skills and therefore there are no teachers who are employed to teach it. And once you've sort of like broken that chain of teaching, it's really hard to recreate it.

Speaker C: Just to be clear here, it's not that the 20th century is lacking in innovative and impressive sculpture, but its most esteemed and successful sculptors think Brancusi, Bourgeois, Giacometti, Moore, Koons do not make traditional realist work. It's out of fashion, as Atalanta learned through her own art school experience. Atalanta's loved drawing since she was a child. She's always been attracted to the high skill 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.

Speaker E: So when I got to art as an undergraduate student, I thought like, oh, this is amazing. I'm going to be able to learn all of these things. But my program, like most art schools, was basically entirely conceptual. So I didn't have any practical classes in terms of like, how do you learn how to paint better? You just have studio time where you sort of figure it out by yourself and then you have crit 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'd 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.

Speaker C: So they can only help you think about it.

Speaker E: Yeah. And I remember thinking, like, the thinking is good, but I'd really like to be able to make the trees look a bit more treeish.

Speaker C: Like, what if you want to make something, who helps you make something? Like, artists don't make things.

Speaker E: The funny irony of the contemporary art school is that if you want to learn how to make something, the person you usually go to is, like, 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 done something like that.

Speaker C: The artistry of getting these dinosaurs to look real is absolutely the most important first step.

Speaker E: It's a bit of an oversimple location to say that 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 sort of the late middle 20th century, but they're doing them as, you know, scary monster props for, you know, Jurassic Park. And that's where the skill is preserved.

Speaker D: We were actually using techniques that were developed hundreds and hundreds of years ago by sculptors of large bronzes and such.

Speaker C: But those Hollywood prop shop, like, the goals, the aesthetic of that world is, like, fairly different than, like, high art sculpture.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker C: Ultimately, Atalanta was so frustrated at 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.

Speaker E: Because when I was doing my undergrad, everyone told me, you know, if you make easel paintings, you're a sort of bourgeois sellout and you hate the people and you're just commercial and you're a loser. Uh, but the idea of doing realist sculpture was, like, so beyond the pale. They hadn't even bothered telling me not to do it.

Speaker C: Atalanta 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.

Speaker E: All of the sculptures that I hadn't sold, I had to heave to a skip because I couldn't store them in my apartment. They're, like, too big. So I thought, like, one of these art forms works in New York City, and one of them doesn't

Speaker C: her story is a microcosm of what's happened to figurative sculpture in the West. Not only is it really, really hard to do an art that 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. When we return. Why? If Trump is serious about getting a whole lot of Ron statues done on a tight timeline, his best bet might be to ask for help from Kim Jong Un.

Speaker B: This episode is sponsored by Back Market I've been thinking lately about Often we treat technology as disposable not because our devices stop working, but because we're constantly being told there's something newer, faster, better, just around the corner. And honestly, if you're shopping for tech right now, whether it's for back to school season work or just because your laptop is finally showing its age, that cycle can get expensive. That's one reason I like what Back Market is doing. Back Market is the leading global marketplace for refurbished tech. Every device they sell has been professionally inspected, tested and restored by professionals. So you're not just taking a chance on an old device. You're getting tech that's been through a rigorous quality process and is backed by what they call the Back Market promise. That means every purchase comes with a one year warranty and 30 day return policy, which takes a lot of the uncertainty out of buying refurbished. And because Back Market tech can cost up to 50% less than buying new, you'll be able to get a higher quality device without stretching your budget and without filling a Landfill. Visit backmarket.com or download the Back Market app to shop now.

Speaker E: M.

Speaker H: Milo's money days are here and we're making it rain for Rewards members For the first time ever, when you make a purchase of 250 or more through July 12, you'll get up to $30 back in extra Milo's Money. Not a member yet? Join for free today because members get more at Lowe's, uh, Milo's money award varies based on status. Members in gold get 30, silver get 20, and bronze get 10. Milo's money valid for 30 days. Restrictions and more terms@lowe's.com Milo's money.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: America has so few figurative sculptures, so when you want these kind of sculptures, they're often commissioned from China or from North Korea.

Speaker C: So, like, if we wanted this to come off in the timeline that was allotted, we would have essentially had to, like, import our garden of American heroes from China.

Speaker E: Yes, or North Korea. Both of them could do it. Great.

Speaker C: As wild as that may sound, think about all we've said. To 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. Tell me about how they make the stuff there.

Speaker E: So North Korea has the world's biggest single art, uh, fabrication place called Mansudae Art Studio, 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 120ft tall. They basically get commissions from the state. They say, we want Kim 120ft tall with his arm raised.

Speaker C: North Korea unveiled giant statues of its former leaders, Kim Il Sung 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 Mansu Hill.

Speaker E: They have lots of different parts, so often if you see sculptures they make, they'll have actually copied the same body, and they'll just, like, switch the heads or switch the hands or use the same trousers, but sort of sculpt a new jacket and they get fabricated and

Speaker C: they go out and where are. They've sent sculptures all over the world.

Speaker E: So the most famous one they've exported is called the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar in Senegal. And it's a man, woman and child kind of striding up a mountain into the sky.

Speaker C: 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 cost 26 million euros. Its creators hope people will come in droves. There's like 15, 20 African nations.

Speaker E: Cambodia.

Speaker C: I mean Germany has a fountain that have been manufactured in North Korea.

Speaker E: 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.

Speaker C: Is there the know how to make like monumental sculpture like anywhere else or they just have the most for the price.

Speaker E: They're the best. But actually China is great at this kind of stuff. It's just more expensive also because China is much more high tech. So they have all of these like 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, uh, lot of the really big American artists will have big studios in China where their work is made.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: 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

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker E: 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 something where the first thing you do is you build the 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'll sit in this hall with hundreds of other students and you have to make a life drawing and a painting. And the teachers will sort of everyone will lay theirs out and the teacher will go along and they're literally just looking for sort of technical skills. And then the ones who have the sort of high enough technical skill set get to go into the school. And at that point they might be asked to sort of develop more of their personal vision, a 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.

Speaker C: And another key difference is those schools start their students very young.

Speaker E: You know, in North Korea, they will pick the kids who they think of artistic talent by around age 5 and by the time that they're age 10, they're doing 8 hours a day of specialist art training along with their regular schooling. In Russia, if you want to become even just a painting conservator, you need to go into a Russian state academy from age 10 onwards and do a whole art training before you consider even touch an old master canvas.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, you're describing it in terms that really resonate with athleticism. We're used to the Russian. 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 class painter, that body knowledge is really important.

Speaker E: 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 where you train them very early, quite consistently.

Speaker C: Like literally, because it's like you're using

Speaker E: your hands, because you're using your hands. You need to build up, you know, muscle memory. And we think this is so obvious for sport. But when I say this about, uh, 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.

Speaker C: 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

Speaker E: doing it with your body all the time. Exactly. Like the really embarrassing thing about being a painter, uh, 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 pigment 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 in which I've rubbed that hairy brush on the cloth.

Speaker C: 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. 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, activity, 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, um, 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

Speaker E: chops, people tend to think, you know, oh, there's no way. These skills have really been lost. They're just not popular anymore. And then when you see something like a culture that like, genuinely wants a really good sculpture of Dwyane Wade and they can't produce it, then people sort of realise like, oh God, we actually, like have lost something here. I mean, look, I say this like, I'm m an artist, a lot of my friends are artists. I love art. 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, 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 realistically, that's fine. If they want to do something totally different, they can also do that.

Speaker C: I find this so interesting, and it just rhymes so much with so much that's happening in the world right now with this idea of like. 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 humans have been able to do 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.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker C: This is the AI thing.

Speaker G: Right.

Speaker C: It's like if we don't keep thinking or writing or making sculptures, we literally just will get worse at those things.

Speaker E: Yeah, skill is use it or lose it. And it's been very obvious across this century in the last one that if you don't teach these things, they don't magically stay in the water.

Speaker G: Foreign.

Speaker C: 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 Rings 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 dakotaring this episode was written by me. It was produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by Josh Levine and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob is senior Technical Director. Our intern is Phoebe Mulder. I want to thank Works in Progress, the magazine Atalanta works for. 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 I actually heard Atalanta talking about sculpture and, uh, knew I wanted to talk to her some more. We'll link 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 decoderinglate.com or call us at 347-460-7281. We love hearing from you and we will see you in two weeks.

Speaker I: Unlock efficiency and innovation with HP Copilot plus PCs from America's favorite PC brand. With up to 34 hours of battery life and Microsoft Copilot built in, you can draft emails and summarize meetings with the fastest, most intelligent, intelligent and secure Windows PCs ever. Tap the banner to learn more at hp.com need expert advice? Call HP Business Technology Advisors at 1-800-761-8417.

Speaker J: Shipping, billing, admin, Payroll, Marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com print postage on demand 24. 7 and schedule pickups from your online office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk free for 60 days.