Monday, October 26, 2015

The New Dark Lord

Reuters:
A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Odessa, Ukraine, has been refashioned into Darth Vader. A Ukrainian artist, Alexander Milov, whose work appeared at Burning Man this year, transformed the statue in response to recent decommunization laws, which require the removal of Communist symbols in Ukraine.
Something about this transformation strikes me as perfect. Milov said that he thought it was appropriate to use an icon of  American pop culture, since "this seems to be more enduring than the Soviet ideal."

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

Legally mandated destruction of symbols that the majority don't like or disagree with? For shame, Ukraine. For shame.

You don't like the statue? You don't want it around? Sell it to someone and replace it. Or put it in a museum as a historical artifact. Or stick it in a warehouse and leave it for future generations to decide what to do with it. But destroying it or defacing it?

What's the difference between this and radical Muslims bombing Buddhist statues and Persian ruins? What gives anyone the right to judge and destroy our collective human history simply because of petty ideological differences?