THE STATE OF AESTHETICS IN NORTH AMERICA TODAY.

If you wish to understand the state of aesthetics in modern Western civilization, the site of the Monument Builders of North America is all the education you need.

It is simultaneously depressing, horrifying, and hilarious, a kind of Doctor Strangelove of Web sites.

From it we also learn that the Funeral and Memorial Information Council has claimed “Have the talk of a lifetime” as a service mark for the pre-need-planning business. Evelyn Waugh could not have invented that slogan.

Nevertheless, the site does tell us that people still desperately want representational art for their cemetery monuments—an observation confirmed by our friend Father Pitt, who reports that there is not a single monument dealer in Allegheny County who does not have a gravestone shaped like a motorcycle prominently displayed in front of his shop.

Comments

  1. Ben Ieghn says:

    Can’t you just imagine what lies beneath the “members only” tab of the website?!…

    I think I will have a traditional memorial stone which reads,”My Other Stone is a Harley”.

  2. I want to be buried with a ludicrously inaccurate alternate-history text on some corrosion/erosion-resistant material that describes me as the first Emperor of a nation whose territory includes most of the Midwest USA, just to mess with future archaeologists.

  3. Captain DaFt says:

    Personally, I’d want a normal tombstone…
    Except for the addition of a sign that reads, “Out to Lunch – Be back soon.”

  4. Dr. Boli says:

    Dr. Boli has always meant to get around to dying one of these days, although, what with one thing and another, he has not had the time so far. In preparation for that eventuality, he has had a mausoleum in the Gothic style prepared for himself, with stained-glass representations of the remarkable events in his life, such as the invention of the letter M, the foundation of his Magazine, and so on. The only slight difficulty is that his life is still accumulating remarkable events, which means that every so often the mausoleum has to be expanded to accommodate more stained glass. The thing already looks like York Minster, and it is beginning to crowd out the cucumber patch in the garden.

  5. Ben Ieghn says:

    A glass mausoleum is a great place to hang, when your a shade…

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