Where We Stand
Dr. Walter Harvey (posthumous)
by Brad Parker
During the 20th century the United States emerged as the richest, most powerful nation in history. And yet the quality of its civic art — its community planning, institutional architecture, and public monuments — deteriorated to the point of catastrophe. Such a coincidence of unrivaled political and economic might with profound cultural dysfunction is unprecedented. At the dawn of a new century, the public is largely unaware that architects, sculptors, painters, and craftsmen can still play a vital role in the perpetuation of civilization through the creation of monumental works that symbolize our highest civic and spiritual ideals.
At the same time, however, a traditional artistic counterculture is emerging as the indispensable alternative to a postmodern, elitist culture that has reduced its works of “art” to a dependence on rarified discourse incomprehensible to ordinary people. Since 2002, the NATIONAL CIVIC ART SOCIETY has nurtured this new counterculture, while challenging fashionable dogmas that have merely served the cause of ugliness. It has sponsored important lectures and symposia as well as exhibitions of painting, sculpture, and architectural drawing. It also has endeavored to bring the new counterculture to policy makers’ attention. The Society will continue to seek the restoration of the classical tradition to its rightful primacy in our nation’s capital, while promoting design that dignifies, rather than degrades, the various realms of human endeavor in city and suburb.