A brief note on standards that have long since begun to slip, because decency compels it: R&B/pop music icon Tina Turner passed away a year and a half ago, and her birthplace of Brownsville, Tenn. (not far from Memphis), has just unveiled a bronze statue to honor the town’s most famous daughter. And it is a travesty for the ages. Gaze into the cruelly twisted visage of what was meant to represent Ike Turner’s infinitely better half. My good word, mother Mary herself never felt less proud.

Tina deserves better, but it’s not as though she’s the first to be desecrated in recent years by local artists who have been commissioned to mangle our pop cultural heroes in sculptural form. A decade and a half ago, Lucille Ball’s hometown of Celoron, N.Y., erected a statue of her so deformed and ugly and unrecognizable that it gained international infamy as “Scary Lucy” (she really did look as if she was coming with a rictus smile to devour your soul) and was finally replaced in 2016 by a much more appropriate tribute. Many a soccer fan has genuflected for at least a few moments before the bucktoothed, goofy bust of footballing icon Cristian Ronaldo — including Ronaldo himself. And look, this trend is nothing new: I haven’t forgotten the Biden administration yet, and that guy sat in the Oval Office for four years with a bust of Robert F. Kennedy that looks as though it was sculpted from a puddle of human filth.

As any classicist well knows, it is impossible not to study the sculpture, metalwork, and architecture of ancient Greece or Rome — or any of the ancient Chinese dynasties, for that matter — without noticing a perceptible rise, plateau, and then subsequent decline in nearly every civilization’s artistic and cultural ambitions. Genius gives way first to decadence and then to a loss of craft and technique, as production becomes demotic and less idiosyncratically artisanal. Every culture has its golden age, silver age, and the like. You may think this is just another poorly cast statue of a second-tier celebrity, but in an earlier era, every small town took fierce pride in its artistic production. I’m not talking about Renaissance Siena, mind you — I’m talking about small-town Pennsylvania or Georgia. Standards are slipping. But it’s the thought that counts in this bronze age of our, I guess.