Statues are lies, selfies in bronze – and you can't bring history to life with a dead art

Why are we obsessed with putting up statues of new heroes to replace old villains like Edward Colston? Reducing history to celebrity culture won’t help anyone understand the full scale and horror of slavery

The statue died as an art form 103 years ago, when Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal to a New York art exhibition. So why, in the 21st century, are we obsessing about putting up statues of new heroes to replace the old villains? All this political radicalism is being betrayed by artistic conservatism.

The moment slave trader Edward Colston’s statue was pulled down in Bristol was a brilliantly apposite piece of performance art: a dadaist act of creativity through destruction that belongs alongside Banksy’s auto-shredding picture as a spectacle of great British cultural dissidence. But it has been followed by a sterile conversation about who does and doesn’t “deserve” a statue that adds nothing whatsoever to anyone’s understanding of slavery, the British empire, racism or any other subject.

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