Virtuosity in today’s art world presents a hard brief to argue insofar as it encompasses virtù, or excellence, which implies hierarchies of values, achievements and, at least in a narrow sense, persons. All of these are currently suspect if not, in the present parlance, downright transgressive. In some quarters, a craft tradition may now be seen as obsolete or, worse yet, exclusive. It is hardly surprising that the draftsmanship of freshman art students has been declining for decades. This shift, to some degree, represents an overcorrection of past failings. In the Ars Poetica, Horace emphasized the importance of both native ability and assiduous learning, but until relatively recently the appearance of talent and the opportunity to cultivate it appeared almost entirely among the privileged classes. Occasionally, a great talent could ascend in society in the same way as a great beauty, but the common lot was mere subsistence, and commoners’ lack of achievement no doubt reinforced aristocratic attitudes and perpetuated self-fulfilling prophecies for generations. The spread of mass literacy, increasing life expectancies and a degree of mass prosperity have fortunately extended to many commoners the opportunity to find out whether they have talent and the will to cultivate it. While we can only wonder how much genius has been wasted in the past, it would be perverse not to relish these new opportunities.
 

Twenty-one years ago, the late architectural historian Spiro Kostof published America by Design, preceded by a PBS series of the same name. The goal of both the series and the book was to “see America as one design…, and to review some of the enduring themes of its history….”¹ In his chapter on public life, Kostof sounded a cautionary note about memorials and monuments, since they “derive their authority from some unified vision—or its presumption.”² He thought the relative paucity of significant national monuments built since World War II indicated a cynicism “about great national agendas, about the methods of forging a national consensus or promoting national ideals.”³ To support this view, he cited the controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was solved by uniting two disparate ideas about memorials. Kostof also noted that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission, created in 1955, had failed to develop an acceptable design in the intervening thirty-some years up to the publication of Kostof’s book.