The removal of Joel Shapiro’s 24-foot-tall abstract outdoor sculpture “Blue” from the Kennedy Center has brought outrage. Yet it asks whether a nation may reconsider its symbols.

Removing “Blue” is an attack on culture. Preserving taste is not defending culture. An institution unable to revise imagery becomes a museum of assumptions.

Those calling themselves progressive are behaving as conservatives: preserving cultural order, and treating its aesthetic premises as settled law. Modernist principles were not America’s cultural language; they were imported and established through institutions.

Lincoln understood that a nation can honor its inheritance without becoming captive to it. His Second Annual Message to Congress in 1862 offered this principle: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and........

© NY Daily News