That's my agent from lightweight.

Tomorrow Avishai is an art historian, and she does a podcast.

Yeah, it's called The Lonely Palette, and every month I try to make art history a little

more accessible, a little less dusty and snooty by focusing on the stories behind one art

work at a time.

Yeah, I love your show.

But there's one kind of public art that's very personal for you, and raises a lot of

interesting philosophical questions, especially in recent years.

And that's why you wanted to come on this show to talk about it.

Yeah, I'm really fascinated by public memorials, like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, or the

9-11 Memorial in New York.

There are so many incredibly rich and really personal issues that inform the aesthetic choices

and the materials used, and really ask who is doing the remembering?

What does it mean to have memory versus history?

And especially in the last 30 years or so, whether or not they should be representational

or abstract, and how that speaks to people really differently.

Memorials are a really fascinating topic, and they seem like they should be timeless.

But they're also, as you might expect, really powerfully tied to their own moment.

Could you define the difference between representational and abstract?

So a representational memorial would probably be something that, like in representational art,

looks like the thing it's supposed to be.

So if you're thinking about a memorial to a war, then you would actually see the soldiers

...