Chicago's liberal elites did it again. Their bad taste put up another eyesore and called it a wonder. From childish posters hung at Chicago L stations, to vulgar faces spitting in Millennium Park, to the recently installed "Agora" in Grant Park, Chicago now has more dreadful public art than just about any city in the U. S.

Donated to Chicago by the artist, "Agora" consists of 106 headless and armless cast iron figures, over 9 feet tall, each weighing nearly eleven hundred pounds. The figures are installed at the south end of Grant Park, near Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue, on land where the old Illinois Central Railroad Station once stood.

Grant Park Advisory Council President Bob O'Niel claims that the sculptures are "the most controversial art installation in Chicago in a long time." He then added, "It is a wonderful project." Park District Commissioner Cindy Mitchell agrees with O'Niel. She revealed also that bad taste among elites extends far beyond Chicago. According to the Commissioner, famed actor and comedian Robin Williams donated "a nice amount" to have the sculptures installed.

A press release for the dedication of "Agora," which means meeting place in Greek, claims it "is a major sculpture by the renowned Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz." The press release continues, "Mayor Richard M. Daley enthusiastically supports the project and this invaluable gift is a gesture of friendship between the sister cities of Warsaw and Chicago."

Not everyone in Chicago is as enthusiastic as the mayor about the installation. Quoted in the Chicago Journal, "Lynn Ridgeway, who lives at a nearby high-rise building...said she hopes the 106 statues...get stolen..." Ridgeway added, "If these are so beautiful, why doesn't Mayor Daley put them in his own front yard?"

What Lynn Ridgeway and her neighbors don't understand is that "beautiful" has nothing to do with public sculpture anymore. Public sculpture gave up any consideration of beauty over a generation ago. Magdalena Abakanowicz says "the figures are hollowed out and missing arms and heads because they are negatives of a body, like bark fallen off a tree." What's beautiful about that?

The American poet Robert Frost remarked once that poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Modern sculpture, however, begins in materials and ends in concepts. Now, there is hardly any delight, wisdom or beauty left in what remains standing.

Some say that Rodin's 1898 monument to the French writer Balzac was the first modern sculpture. Prior to Rodin's work, traditional artists understood art to mean not a concept, but an imitation of an action in the Classical sense. Materials were used with imagination and meaning to present that imitation.

After Rodin, public sculpture changed. It stopped being beautiful and it stopped being an imitation of an action in the old Aristotelian sense. Instead, sculpture and many other arts became a presentation of materials and concepts. Sculpture stopped being Classical and became "Modern."

Modern art eventually became closed and self-referring. This may be acceptable for private collectors and galleries, but in the public realm it becomes corrosive. Today, public art is simply propaganda for moribund liberalism and its global aspirations. Even something like the Statue of Liberty would be criticized as being sexist by some contemporary, transnational artists.

Liberalism, diversity and multiculturalism have created a public art that ignores the public. It is often an art that is inhuman, intellectual, and anti-local. This is most evident in public art and public sculpture in Chicago. It is a reason also why most people ignore public art. For them it is an obstacle and an eyesore, best skirted on their way to and from work.

What it means to be human is a question of value. Try as it may, public art cannot escape these values. Western Civilization answers the question "What is human?" differently from the answer given by Buddhist Civilization. Exaltation of the human form in public art used to be a hallmark of Western Civilization and its humanity. Put differently, you didn't go to China to study the nude. Put, yet, another way: In the West the hope of our salvation comes in human form.

All this has changed, now. Modern art wants to be value free. This art often distorts or ignores the traditional representation of the human form. Because many of Chicago's elites are disenchanted with Western Civilization, they prefer a distortion of what is human, too. These elites seem weary and confused. They want to avoid the moral responsibility that goes with human existence. That is one reason why they spend money to put up a work like "Agora." They would prefer an intellectual art instead of an art that lifts up the humanity of American values.

Whatever the Statue of Liberty means to convey, it's human likeness makes some of that meaning immediately evident to anyone who sees it, no matter how unlettered they may be. This is not the case with much modern and public sculpture. It is certainly not the case with 106 headless torsos. Here, the artist has to offer an explanation to the public of the concepts involved. After the explanation, many people scratch their heads and then walk away. Like much of modern liberalism, modern sculpture is a form of Gnosticism that requires a secret knowledge to fathom its mystery.

Abakanowicz says: "I immerse in the crowd, like a grain of sand in the friable sands. I am fading among the anonymity of glances, movements, smells, in the common absorption of air, in the common pulsation of juices under the skin..." The individuality which the Athenians prized and of which we were once heirs, is drowned in these words of explanation.

The artist continues, "I'm not making a decoration. I'm making a statement, a statement about nature and our consciousness." Ah, yes! Her words are spoken like a true missionary of the modern. Yet, we have to wonder what kind of consciousness inhabits a headless giant. Is it too much for Abakanowicz to realize that in the course of her lifetime liberalism in Chicago turned into its opposite, just as her work says the opposite of consciousness and individuality?

The British art historian Kenneth Clark suggests that every masterpiece is rooted in the local. It then transcends the local to disclose the universal, and in doing so tells us what it is to be human. Dismissed as so much bourgeois propaganda by some progressives, Clark's ideas still remain a powerful criticism of Abakanowicz's work in Chicago.

There are no local roots in this forest of torsos. Certainly, there are many local artist's whose work could be put on public display in the city. Furthermore, actions that could be imitated by art and displayed in public are not wanting in Chicago, either. A firefighter saving a child from the Our Lady of Angels school fire, or events surrounding the Fort Dearborn Massacre are all worthy of public display. But to do this is to risk making a value judgment. Modern art must be global in its reference, and thus denies the value of the local.

Because Warsaw and Chicago are sister cities, we see that they also share the same artistic disease. National borders no longer stop the virus that compels some women to make a statement about nature and consciousness. In 2005, the Center of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko held an unveiling of a sculpture by American artist Patricia Quilichini. Her marble sculpture "Message from the Caribbean" was commissioned by the Center for its outdoor museum.

Quilichini's work echoes a politically correct complaint about the environment. At the unveiling ceremony, Quilichini said that, "This message, personified by a broken seashell, is intended to enlarge the awareness of our ecological environment." How charitable of her. Liberal elites always want to enlarge the awareness of ordinary people, who supposedly cannot think for themselves.

Quilichini then adds that, "It is my intention to remind the viewer of the responsibility that all of us have to conserve our environment." You can hear the applause of smug insiders echoing across the Atlantic as soon as these words are spoken. Then, there is the clinking of glasses in a champagne toast. No one realizes at that party how our environment might be conserved better without the waste that is this broken seashell on display.

The local may produce greatness. Lorado Taft, born in Elmwood, Illinois is a good example of that. Taft's "Alma Mater" at the University of Illinois at Urban or his "The Fountain of the Great Lakes" at the Art Institute of Chicago demonstrate that public sculpture can support traditional social values. Sometimes called a populist, Taft's public works float on a political tide more democratic than the tide that tries to lift Magdalena Abakanowicz's cast iron forms into our lives.

Unfortunately, the secular Puritanism of modernity and globalization along with the one party politics of Chicago prevents local art from emerging these days. Those who commit the sin of decoration are anathema, here. Perhaps only time will tell if Taft's vision outlasts that of Abakanowicz's. It is sobering to remember Austin Dobson's words when looking at the work of these two artists, one local and the other foreign: "Time goes, you say? Ah no, Alas, time stays, we go."

Born into an aristocratic, Polish-Russian family on her parent's estate in Falenty, Poland, it is possible the now 76 year old Magdalena Abakanowicz thinks she rides the wave of modernity into a new world order. That wave shimmers with multiculturalism like the giant kidney bean that reflects Chicago's skyline a mile north on Michigan Avenue. Yet, just the opposite could be true: her parade of headless men leads to where all men who lose their heads in mush end up--at a necropolis.

Public sculptures like the "Agora" reflect a reality where the human becomes monstrous. It is not an art worthy of a free people, but the art of machines and madness. What image are we left with in Grant Park? A row of giants on the earth that is supposed to enlarge our awareness? These are rusted and hollow men, shells who wander aimlessly, with their souls harvested for the politics of moribund liberalism.

Walking among the giants of the "Agora," we see creatures who could be the nightmare that embryonic stem cell research may create. These figures without heads and arms are radioactive mutations, or godless wanderers before Noah and the flood. If every dream is a wish, and these monsters are our wish, then we walk among the dead.

Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. His book, A WINTER OF WORDS, about the ethnic cleansing at Daley College, is available from amazon.com. Visit him at RobertKleinEngler.com