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December 2012

The sad & sorry Smithsonian

by Bruce Cole

On the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.


The National Museum of American History

There it sits, rusting away on a base of weed-infested gravel, dwarfed by tall trees masking its silhouette and blocking any view from afar. A worse setting would be hard to imagine. Adding insult to injury, it’s filthy, strewn with trash, defaced with graffiti, and colonized by bird nests.

Alexander Calder’s Gwenfritz (named after its socialite patron Gwendolyn Cafritz) was designed for the Constitution Avenue entrance of the Washington’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Moved years ago from its original location to an obscure corner of the museum’s grounds, the thirty-five-ton sculpture has morphed over time into a metaphor for the museum itself: dis ...

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Bruce Cole is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 December 2012, on page 19

Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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