Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial

Washington, D.C.

“Martin Luther King Jr. was white?” asked Blake Gopnik in TheDailyBeast.com. That’s surely not what our history books teach. But the “strange” monument to the civil-rights leader that’s just been unveiled on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., gets a lot wrong. Built with private funds after a 27-year gestation, it sets a granite likeness of King in a “hot and forbidding” plaza and tries to add drama by inviting visitors to walk between two rough-hewn blocks of stone before they approach the main attraction from behind. That central figure is small for the site—“dwarfed by most decent-size trees.” But it still stands 29 feet tall, and when you finally look up to the face, you can’t help noting that the pale, pink granite bears “a striking resemblance to pale, freckled skin.”

Perfection wasn’t necessary, said Richard Lacayo in Time. This $120 million tribute still ranks as “the most effective monument to appear in Washington” since Maya Lin’s “brilliant” Vietnam Veterans Memorial set a new standard almost 30 years ago. King’s “stiffly modeled” figure is its worst feature: Chinese artist Lei Yixin seems to have spent too many years banging out busts of Mao. But the trio of stone blocks is effective. Borrowing from a King speech, the designers intended that the central mass be seen as a “stone of hope” hewn from “a mountain of despair.” Despite the layout’s gimmicky origins, it “succeeds in calling up feelings of anguish and elation” within the heart of any visitor passing through the plaza.

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Great, so a 30-foot-tall pink mountain of despair now has a permanent place on our National Mall, said John Cook in Gawker.com. “Whatever happened to statues? Just a nice statue?” King deserved better than to have his backside bonded forever to an abstract slab, as if he were “the victim of a transporter mishap on Star Trek.” Unfortunately, there’s “some sort of arms race with memorials to make each one more high-concept” than the last.