On January 18^th, a fire broke out at the Brussels Center for Fine Arts, often referred to as Bozar. While no artworks were damaged in the blaze, the building sustained significant fire and water damage.

The cause of the fire is currently unknown, but it was largely contained in the roof of the Bozar, reminiscent of the fire that devastated Notre Dame in 2019. The blaze broke out on Monday and around 100 firefighters were required on scene to work to extinguish it. Smoke filled the air around the Bozar but there have been no reports of people harmed by the fire except for one emergency worker who was briefly admitted to the hospital after fighting the fire.

Henry Le Boeuf Hall, the Bozar performing arts venue, bore the brunt of the fire’s damage as well as water damage. According to Paul Dujardin, director of the Bozar, the recently restored organ in the hall was most damaged.

While any damage is sad news, the results of the fire could have been far worse. The Bozar is closed to the public on Mondays so there were no visitors to evacuate. Additionally, just days before the fire, an exhibition on dance and contemporary art was uninstalled from gallery space that was flooded with water during efforts to contain the fire.

“Our people are on site to make the necessary observations,” a representative for the Brussels building agency told Bruzz, a Belgian news source, noting that water damage will be more visible in the coming days. “There has already been a meeting this morning [19 January] with the fire brigade and Bozar to measure the impact of the damage on the Henry Le Boeuf Hall and the exhibition areas. But above all, to take the first, necessary measures to prevent further water damage.”

According to a statement released by the Bozar, the cause of the fire is under investigation. The Bozar also thanked the emergency workers for battling the fire and its community. “You blew us away with your countless emotional messages,” wrote the arts center. “We cannot stress enough how deeply we appreciate your support during these traumatic days, and we share not only your hopes for the future, but also a staunch resolve to overcome this.”

Due to the fire, the Bozar will be closed until January 25^th according to its website.

Just days before leaving Washington DC, soon to be former President Donald Trump issued an executive order with a list of 244 people who could be memorialized with a statue in his proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.”

Issued on January 18^th, the executive order is an update to an order Trump issued in July of last year in response to heightened tensions concerning public statues and memorials. During his Independence Day speech, controversially delivered at the base of Mount Rushmore, Trump announced plans for the garden that would honour what he called “the giants” of US history. It was then that Trump created the Interagency Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, a task force that was instructed to locate a home for the garden and drive the project forward.

“Across this Nation, belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity,” reads the order in part. It goes on to compare growing frustration with statues devoted to problematic people and events and the vandalism of memorials to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the US Civil War. According to Trump, the garden would be “America’s answer” to the “reckless attempt to erase [America’s] heroes, values, and entire way of life.”

Figures from both recent and more distant history have made the list but more than 70 percent of those included so far are men. Their accomplishments are varied, ranging from the sciences, to politics, to sports, to activism, among other fields. Among the artists who could be honoured are Ansel Adams, Charles Wilson Peale, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Norman Rockwell.

The garden, which is unlikely to actually come to fruition, is certainly an unusual suggestion that has raised eyebrows and drawn criticism. In October, Trump even joked about naming the garden after himself. Executive director of the American Historical Association James Grossman said the list of suggested honourees ranged from “odd to probably inappropriate to provocative.”

Historian Michael Beschloss weighed in telling Axios: “No president of the United States or federal government has any business dictating us citizens who our historical heroes should be. This is not Stalin’s Russia. Any American who loves democracy should make sure there is never some official, totalitarian-sounding ‘National Garden of American Heroes,’ with names forced upon us by the federal government.”

As it presently stands, the following are the individuals the executive order lists as those who should be recognised in the garden:

Ansel Adams
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Muhammad Ali
Luis Walter Alvarez
Susan B. Anthony
Hannah Arendt
Louis Armstrong
Neil Armstrong
Crispus Attucks
John James Audubon
Lauren Bacall
Clara Barton
Todd Beamer
Alexander Graham Bell
Roy Benavidez
Ingrid Bergman
Irving Berlin
Humphrey Bogart
Daniel Boone
Norman Borlaug
William Bradford
Herb Brooks
Kobe Bryant
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Sitting Bull
Frank Capra
Andrew Carnegie
Charles Carroll John Carroll
George Washington Carver
Johnny Cash
Joshua Chamberlain
Whittaker Chambers
Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman
Ray Charles
Julia Child
Gordon Chung-Hoon
William Clark, Henry Clay
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Roberto Clemente
Grover Cleveland
Red Cloud
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody
Nat King Cole
Samuel Colt
Christopher Columbus
Calvin Coolidge
James Fenimore Cooper
Davy Crockett
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.
Miles Davis
Dorothy Day
Joseph H. De Castro
Emily Dickinson
Walt Disney
William “Wild Bill” Donovan
Jimmy Doolittle
Desmond Doss
Frederick Douglass
Herbert Henry Dow
Katharine Drexel
Peter Drucker
Amelia Earhart
Thomas Edison
Jonathan Edwards
Albert Einstein
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Duke Ellington
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Medgar Evers
David Farragut
The Marquis de La Fayette
Mary Fields
Henry Ford
George Fox
Aretha Franklin,
Benjamin Franklin
Milton Friedman
Robert Frost
Gabby Gabreski
Bernardo de Gálvez
Lou Gehrig
Theodor Seuss Geisel
Cass Gilbert
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
John Glenn
Barry Goldwater
Samuel Gompers
Alexander Goode
Carl Gorman
Billy Graham
Ulysses S. Grant
Nellie Gray
Nathanael Greene
Woody Guthrie
Nathan Hale
William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr.
Alexander Hamilton
Ira Hayes
Hans Christian Heg
Ernest Hemingway
Patrick Henry
Charlton Heston
Alfred Hitchcock
Billie Holiday
Bob Hope
Johns Hopkins
Grace Hopper
Sam Houston
Whitney Houston
Julia Ward Howe
Edwin Hubble
Daniel Inouye
Andrew Jackson
Robert H. Jackson
Mary Jackson
John Jay
Thomas Jefferson
Steve Jobs
Katherine Johnson
Barbara Jordan
Chief Joseph
Elia Kazan
Helen Keller
John F. Kennedy
Francis Scott Key
Coretta Scott King
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Russell Kirk
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Henry Knox
Tadeusz Kościuszko
Harper Lee
Pierre Charles L’Enfant
Meriwether Lewis
Abraham Lincoln
Vince Lombardi
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Clare Boothe Luce
Douglas MacArthur
Dolley Madison
James Madison
George Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
William Mayo
Christa McAuliffe
William McKinley
Louise McManus
Herman Melville
Thomas Merton
George P. Mitchell
Maria Mitchell
William “Billy” Mitchell
Samuel Morse
Lucretia Mott
John Muir
Audie Murphy
Edward Murrow
John Neumann
Annie Oakley
Jesse Owens
Rosa Parks
George S. Patton, Jr.
Charles Willson Peale
William Penn
Oliver Hazard Perry
John J. Pershing
Edgar Allan Poe
Clark Poling
John Russell Pope
Elvis Presley
Jeannette Rankin
Ronald Reagan
Walter Reed
William Rehnquist
Paul Revere
Henry Hobson Richardson
Hyman Rickover
Sally Ride
Matthew Ridgway
Jackie Robinson
Norman Rockwell
Caesar Rodney
Eleanor Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Betsy Ross
Babe Ruth
Sacagawea
Jonas Salk
John Singer Sargent
Antonin Scalia
Norman Schwarzkopf
Junípero Serra
Elizabeth Ann Seton
Robert Gould Shaw
Fulton Sheen
Alan Shepard
Frank Sinatra
Margaret Chase Smith
Bessie Smith
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Jimmy Stewart
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gilbert Stuart
Anne Sullivan
William Howard Taft
Maria Tallchief
Maxwell Taylor
Tecumseh
Kateri Tekakwitha
Shirley Temple
Nikola Tesla
Jefferson Thomas
Henry David Thoreau
Jim Thorpe
Augustus Tolton
Alex Trebek
Harry S. Truman
Sojourner Truth
Harriet Tubman
Dorothy Vaughan
C. T. Vivian
John von Neumann
Thomas Ustick Walter
Sam Walton
Booker T. Washington
George Washington
John Washington
John Wayne
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Phillis Wheatley
Walt Whitman
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Roger Williams
John Winthrop
Frank Lloyd Wright
Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright
Alvin C. York
Cy Young
Lorenzo de Zavala

In the last year, there has been a reckoning with statues and monuments honouring and glorifying problematic events and people of the past. This week, UK Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has set forth new UK laws that would make it more difficult to remove monuments across the country moving forward.

In an article published in The Telegraph, Jenrick stated: “Latterly there has been an attempt to impose a single, often negative narrative which not so much recalls our national story, as seeks to erase part of it. This has been done at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies.” He then announced his plans to bring “due process” back to UK heritage to ensure that monuments aren’t destroyed by “woke militants” or removed “on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob.”

Censorship is among the chief reasons behind the new mandates that will require planning permission before the removal or alteration of any public monument. Additionally, local councils will need to consult with their residents and guarantee any changes abide by council rules.

The motion comes after many statues across the UK have garnered new, and often unfavourable, attention. Question marks have loomed over many monuments, including those devoted to Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister. Most notable, though, was last summer when a group of protesters toppled a Bristol statue of Edward Colston, a 17^th century man who greatly profited off the Atlantic slave trade. The anti-racism protest was held in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and during the June 7^th events, the statue was pulled down from its plinth and rolled into the Bristol harbour. The statue was later retrieved from the waters and is now housed at a museum. Meanwhile, four members of the protest have been charged with criminal damages in relation to the toppling.

The Colston statue had been a point of contention for some time, perhaps even since it was erected more than 100 years ago. In 2019, plans to contextualise the statue of Colston with a plaque were abandoned after officials were unable to agree on wording, which begs the question of how well Jenrick’s plans might play out.

These changes will not only affect public statues, but plaques and other monuments, as well. According to a government press release published the same day as Jenrick’s article, the new laws will “make clear that historic monuments should be retained and explained.” The press release also dubbed Jenrick’s changes as the “most significant new protection for England’s heritage since the 1967 Civic Amenities Act established Conservation Areas.”

Jenrick’s new laws have garnered criticism from many, including director of the Runnymede Trust Dr Halima Begum, who told The Guardian that these plans were “nothing more than smoke and mirrors.” Begum’s sentiments were echoed by others who questioned by the government was dealing with public monuments when the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the UK.

Despite differing opinions on the validity of the new series of laws, what is certain is that changes to UK law will not be the end of the discussion, nor will it likely make the path forward less murky.

On the week that President Donald Trump will leave the White House, a six-metre tall inflatable caricature of The Apprentice star turned president will enter the Museum of London’s collection.

The Trump baby balloon first appeared in 2018 amongst protesters who gathered in Parliament Square for an anti-Trump demonstration coinciding with the president’s first official visit to the UK as head of the US government.

The balloon, itself, was designed by Matt Bonner and constructed by Imagine Inflatables, a company based in Leicester. The oblong balloon is an imitation of the president, who has mere days left as president. Clad in a diaper, the bare-chested baby is orange all over, except for its swath of yellow hair. Its raccoon-like eyes narrow as its mouth sneers in such a way that you can almost hear it yelling “you’re fired!” In its hand, a cell phone, the tool which Trump used to garner support via Twitter and other social media platforms, many of which were recently deactivated.

Not long after it hit the scene, the Museum of London expressed their interest in the balloon, but before it made it into their vaults, the balloon made appearances at protests around the world, including those in various places in the US, Ireland, Denmark, France, and Argentina.

“Of course the museum is not political, and does not have any view about the state of politics in the States,” said Sharon Ament, director of the Museum of London. The balloon, though, was an obvious expression of frustration by people in the UK and it perfectly exemplified the satirical way that those people often address frustration. “We use humour a lot. And we poke fun at politicians,” continued Ament, “This is a big – literally – example of that.”

In a statement about the balloon and its acquisition, the creators of the Trump baby said:

“While we’re pleased that the Trump baby can now be consigned to history along with the man himself, we’re under no illusions that this is the end of the story. We hope the baby’s place in the museum will stand as a reminder of when London stood against Mr Trump – but will prompt those who see it to examine how they can continue the fight against the politics of hate. Most of all, we hope the Trump baby serves as a reminder of the politics of resistance that took place during Trump’s time in office.

“This large inflatable was just a tiny part of a global movement. A movement that was led by the marginalised people who Trump’s politics most endangered – and whose role in this moment should never be underestimated.”

The balloon will be included in the museum’s collection of protest items. It will join their ranks of ephemera used by the Suffragette movement, civil rights activist, and environmental protesters. The balloon is being held in quarantine at the museum, to ensure no bugs make their way into the collection, before it will be fitted into its new home. For the creators of the Trump baby, it is hoped that the balloon will serve as a reminder of the “policies of hate” that led to its making.