How a traffic circle became the site of the most expensive self-portrait in American history
There are moments in the history of public art when vulgarity achieves such spectacular velocity that it briefly resembles vision.
Donald Trump's proposed triumphal arch for Washington — a 250-foot aureate confection of gilded eagles, splayed lions, and a winged figure Trump has described, with the art-historical confidence of a man who once franchised steak, as "Lady Liberty" — is one of those moments.
It does not merely cross the line of taste.
It pole-vaults over it, lands in the gift shop, and demands a commemorative coin.
Let us be precise about what we are looking at.
The design, rendered by Harrison Design with the earnest competence of people who have been asked to gild something and are determined to gild it thoroughly, presents a structure that would rise more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial.
Lincoln himself, of course, had the decency to be assassinated before anyone could ask him how tall his monument should be.
Trump has suffered no such editorial intervention.
The arch would overtop the Arc de Triomphe — that 164-foot limestone elegy Napoleon ordered after Austerlitz.
It would eclipse Pyongyang’s Arch of Triumph, that concrete hymn to self-regard commissioned by Kim Il-sung.
It would outgrow Mexico City’s Monumento a la Revolución, a building that at least had the decency to begin as something else before becoming a monument to thwarted ambitions.
This one begins and ends as ambition uninterruptible.
It arrives whole, self-generated, immaculate in its grandiosity, like a pharaoh who skips the dynasty and goes straight to the pyramid.
The inscriptions — "One Nation Under God," "Liberty and Justice for All" — are the lettering of a man who has discovered that patriotism, like marinara sauce, improves everything it is poured over.
Four lions crouch at the base.
Eagles flank the barrel.
A winged figure blazes at the summit, holding a torch that will presumably illuminate the traffic circle connecting Washington to northern Virginia, or possibly a signal to passing aircraft.
The cost is estimated at $15 million, a number that achieves real comedy only when compared to the monument’s aesthetic ambitions, which hover somewhere around Versailles-on-Red-Bull with a side of commemorative hubris.
This is not architecture.
It is gold-plated self-regard with load-bearing columns.
History's genuinely great triumphal arches were built by men who had, at minimum, triumphed over something external.
Titus had Jerusalem.
Constantine had Maxentius.
Napoleon, at the moment of commissioning, had most of continental Europe.
What Trump has triumphed over is less clear — democracy, perhaps, or zoning restrictions.
The veterans suing to block construction argue it would destroy the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
This is correct, and almost poignant.
Lincoln looked toward the graves of the fallen.
The new arch looks toward itself.
Lincoln looked outward, toward sacrifice, toward the irreversible cost of the republic's survival. The new arch, blazing and lion-bookended and torch-crowned in its traffic circle, looks inward, upward, and most persistently — in every gilded, wing-encrusted, self-regarding inch — directly at itself.
