Frank Stella: The Prince of Homberg (2001).
Aluminum, stainless steel, white paint on fiberglass and carbon fiber.
31’ x 39’ x 34’; 20,000 lbs.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

If you need a snapshot of us circa 2001, Mr. Frank Stella has, at some inconvenience and expense, provided same. His new monumental sculpture, The Prince of Homberg, destined for a prominent site on the Mall in Washington outside the National Gallery of Art, is us. Here. Now.

Not us as we fancy ourselves on the nightly news, in weekly church rituals, in annual or biennial or quadrennial conferring of prizes, but us as we are, as we would appear to an alien visitor whose vision had not been shaped and warped by our own self-satisfied propaganda. Not us in our masters of the universe guise, but us in our kindergarten tinkertoy guise.

Clever? Oh yes (check the brave deployment of metals in unlikely, gravity-defying arrangements). Just not quite as clever as we think.

Beautiful? Do we really want to get into that smelly kettle of 2,500-year-old fish? Take another look. Clearly the product of a High Culture that has left beauty far behind on its long trek to the heights of alienation.

Transcendental? The mere mention of course produces guffaws from the balcony seats where the academics sit and frigid silence from the loge boxes where the critics sit.

Mimetic? Now we’re getting somewhere. Art imitating life? Any non-myopic denizen of 2001, and granted there ain’t many of that species left, can clearly see a strong, strong resemblance between Mr. Stella’s piece and, well, us:

Ungainly, jury-rigged, flashy, precariously balanced, tense, hi-tech, Babel-like, hopelessly confused and conflicted, marked by tiny areas of grace and beauty, gaunt, meaninglessly redundant, cold cold cold, hazardous to passers-by, the whole thing held tautly in place by guy wires, ephemeral, ephemeral, ephemeral.

That's us, all right. The spitting image.

Uncomfortably, Mr. Stella helps us begin to see the unbridled vanity of the modernist century, and with that vision begins painful awareness, for us the greedy children of that century, the children of vanity, of our own unrecognized and massive shortcomings. So far from nature have we wandered, so merciless and relentless have we become in our monomaniac dissection of things that we commission, accept, and hail a gigantic, unflinchingly honest self-portrait, and we then install it smack dab in front of the capitol of the empire where the cocks-of-the-walk cannot but glimpse it as they enter to do the world’s business.

Popes and princes once marveled at Velazquez’s portraits of themselves, unable to see that he had painted their naked and ugly, greedy and vain souls. Mr. Frank Stella has pulled off a similar dangerous feat. He’s told us the truth about ourselves, gotten praised and paid for it.

Given the global momentum of our vanity as children of the 20^th century, there’s a good chance he’ll get away with it and die to a flourish of Marine trumpets.

An important work? You bet the boots Custer died in. It’s just that for a good long while we’re going to go around thinking it’s important for all the wrong reasons.