by Patricia N. Saffran and Ann McLean

American museums used to have art exhibitions that dignified the human spirit. By contrast, today’s museums promote the wonton destruction and desecration of great works of art, mainly targeting the South, as in the Monuments Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick in Los Angeles. Currently, museum policies are more in keeping with Joseph Goebbels, who said, “We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.”

The museums’ new role is to cover up what the public wants as well. On October 24, 2025, the Valentine Museum in Richmond was supposed to release the results of their survey about Richmond’s Confederate statues, done jointly with the Black History Museum (BHM). The monuments are either sitting next to a sewer near the James River, Richmond, or they were sent secretly, without the approval of the public, to L.A.’s Monuments Exhibition, where they’re on display unrestored with paint splashes to help ridicule the South.

(Charlottesville’s Beaux Arts monuments fared worse with Lee melted down by the Jefferson School African Heritage Center, and Keck’s masterpiece of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, bought by L.A. and subsequently destroyed by Kara Walker to make into a new monster sculpture, Unmanned Drone, for LA’s show. She ignored that Jackson taught black children to read and write.)

Over more than three years and repeated requests, the Valentine Museum has never released the results, and the survey is still up at the BHM. The questions have changed a bit over the years. Formerly, it asked what do you think should be done with Richmond’s Confederate monuments? Melt down, place in a museum, put back on Monument Avenue with added signage, and so on. Perhaps the results of those questions went counter to what museum officials in Virginia in general want the public to believe: that they’re responsible professionals whose training taught them how to preserve precious historic sculptures in their charge. The reality is the public by two thirds still wants the monuments standing, not brought down. The museum curators who are condemning, destroying or allowing degradation of those historic monuments are guilty of malpractice. 

According to Tate museum’s art-term dictionary, a curator “is someone employed by a museum or gallery to manage a collection of artworks or artifacts … and acquire, care for and develop a collection.” Curators also arrange displays and interpret the collection “in order to inform, educate and inspire the public.”  

The problem at hand is that “care for” has been abandoned by certain contemporary ‘curators’, who, like Goebbles, have politicized western art away from its Judeo-Christian tradition, disparaging the memetic classically trained Beaux arts sculptors. “Curator” Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African Heritage Center in Charlottesville, went against curatorial protocol and actually oversaw the complete melting down of Shrady/Lentelli’s equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, ingots of which are now on display at the L.A. Monuments show.

The curatorial malpractice extends to cancelling — never discussing— important theological tenets surrounding the historical context of the statues. For instance, the Lost Cause which formed a landscape of memory, was a post-war movement in the South to memorialize the noblest aspects of the Confederacy’s struggle for Independence, which was deemed a given by those subscribing to the original Constitution of 1787, where the states were in a voluntary compact of their own choosing.

Current museum curators such as Hamza Walker of L.A. Monuments who refuse to follow conservation principles, brazenly describe the Lost Cause as a “myth” rather than a natural response to widespread carnage (over 300,000 killed in the South) and altering of the Constitution as they understood it. The Lost Cause was suffused with a Judeo-Christian ethic, from speeches to ceremonies, to clergy giving long-form sermons and eulogies, to hymns and prayers.

The new radical curators and art historians disparage and seek to redefine the Lost Cause away from its provable aims. Thus, those academics as well as the curators, commit a form of malpractice in their interpretation of the leaders who fought against actual invasion of their homeland and destruction and theft of their farms and property. Complexitites of the slave issue notwithstanding, the life and death aspect of the struggle seems to further the real American myth of the virtuous North fighting to liberate slaves in the wicked South. (See Lincoln’s first inaugural address.) As to the BHM survey it also now concentrates on monuments created during the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, 1870 to 1955 but never really clarifies why it’s emphasizing the Lost Cause. 

It’s not just in the South where officials, and politicians, are condemning historic monuments. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wasted no time in singling out for the chopping block the Columbus statues at Columbus Circle, NYC, and the one in Astoria for which he posed giving it the “finger,” which angered Italian-Americans. The history of Gaetano Russo’s Columbus Circle statue alludes him. Apparently, all he can think about is Columbus’s possible connection to slavery. As a socialist, Mamdani should have known that small contributions from Italian-Americans funded the monument, which should have made it sacrosanct. City officials are currently trying to landmark both pieces to protect them from Mamdani removing them. 

As to the Monuments Exhibition in L.A., it presupposes in its PR releases that the U.S. remains a “racist,” “white supremacist” society against an overwhelming body of evidence to the contrary — not the least of which is the near-monolithic conviction among artists and museum curators themselves who dominate popular culture and propagate their unhistorical version of history.

Patricia N. Saffran is a historical preservationist living in New York City. Ann McLean, Ph.D, is an Art and Architectural historian, wife, mother, and artist living in Richmond.