The paper illuminates the power of public monuments as symbolic sites of meaning and explores their role in the construction of a landscape of colonial power.
But then, look again: it cannot be long before you realise that Velázquez, like his puckish admirer Dalí, is not really a conservative at all, that his eye constantly turns away from the centre of power to paint monuments to lesser orders, imperfect bodies, and lower species.
The world's dictators have a naughty habit of commemorating their absolute power in monuments, statues, colossal building projects, and extravagantly tacky homes.
When they were built, these were symbols of power: monuments to the "we know best" welfare state or corporations or God (Germany's concrete churches, such as Gottfried Böhm's at Neviges, are sublime).
During the Soviet era, successive leaderships intent on leaving their mark went about building thousands of monuments to their power.
And I understood anew why my Northern friends still kid me, despite my protests to the contrary, that I grew up in the South in a city whose multitude of monuments retains the power to dramatize our nation's history, both in its triumphs and its traumas.
In a late poem, "View from the Hill", written about Washington DC, Brodsky surveys the capital city, the city of monuments and victories and power.
In stark contrast to the monuments to the power of Renaissance and Counter-Reformation popes, tourists can relive the wicked ways of the emperor who slaughtered early Christians.
I began to realize that institutions like these are essentially monuments to the power of those ugly and dehumanizing stories.
His God-fearing releases under the gospel-influenced Floorplan moniker are absolutely fucking stratospheric, testaments and monuments to the power of dance music, unfuckwithable, timeless invocations of the power of potential transcendence.
GreenTech's story is in part a monument to the power of a politically connected company.
