Trump’s using his National Garden of American Heroes to once again declare that national art must be classical, prohibiting any modernist takes. He tried this before, for all new federal architecture.
Yet the greatest contradiction in the proposal may be its approach to art and speech. Even as the president makes the case for sculpture in teaching history and inspiring unity, his order advances another front in the culture war by dictating an aesthetic vision for the park that emphasizes only the literal. “All statues in the National Garden should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations,” the executive order reads.