Face Time -- Mount Rushmore

Gutzon Borglum is the man who sculpted or blasted (or whatever you want to call it) the four presidential faces at Mount Rushmore.

Much of the carving of Washington, Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt over 14 years of construction did not go as Borglum first planned. The monument's original design called for the Presidents to be finished down to their waists.

He sits back and thinks Well, now I've done it. Now I've created the damnedest art work in the whole world. I saw the blank rock side of a mountain in South Dakota, and I conquered it. I must be a genius.

The truth of the matter is that Gutzon Borgium was no genius. he was a klutz when offered hammer and chisel. His real talents were in other fields.

It takes a while, looking at Rushmore, to figure out the problem. The scope is all wrong. The whole of it is poorly defined, and wretchedly executed. Being so massive, we think it is artistic per se. The physical size of it overwhelms us, makes us say "Wow!" and "How did they do that?" But the truth of the matter is that Borglum wouldn't know good sculpture if it sat on his lap and stuck its tongue in his ear. The placement of the four heads is all wrong. Why is Teddy looking so hard at Lincoln's non-existent ear? Why does Jefferson look to be stoned, as it were? Why does Washington appear to have just eaten a bug? Most of all --- what's with the scale of it? Despite its massiveness, it has a vague ill-conceived feeling, a feeling of tentativeness that tells us that the artist was not quite an artist, but rather, a dandy political string-puller and fund-raiser (for Gutzon Borglum).

After reading this all-too-detailed life of Yet Another Pained and Tedious Artist, we are surprised that they didn't inscribe these words on his gravestone:

I'm not dead.
It's just a rumor.
Spread by my enemies.
So they can steal my ideas from me.