It looks very impressive. As a rule there are two sorts of monumental sculptures: those that depict real political leaders, and those that don't. The general trend is that those that don't (The Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Christ of Rio Harbor, the Christ of the Andes, the Cross at the Valle de los Caidos monument in Spain that Franco built, the huge statue of Benito Juarez in Queretaro, the Angel de la Independencia and La Diana in Mexico City, the Obelisco of Buenos Aires) were mostly called ugly when built, and then have all acquired an improved opinion with the passage of time.
The Statue of Liberty got less criticism because the French built it, but the US had to raise money from schoolchildren to built a place for it and erect it, and the hand and the torch did a tour of the country for several years to this purpose.The idea of hitting up school children for small coins began here, and ended up as the March of Dimes.
I bet that the Crazy Horse statue will be a real tourist draw once it is completed: it has to be the largest monument of them all: it is a sculpted mountain, really.
Even Stone Mountain, built with the aid of Kluxers, has a certain amount of style nowadays, despite all the feuding over it in the first years. There is a similar canyon wall sculpture dedicated to the Mexican Revolution near the highway that connects Saltillo and Linares in Northern Mexico. Not even a big enough draw for a soda pop stand, but quite impressive.
Monumental statues of politicians tend to get torn down. I doubt that this will be the fate of Mt Rushmore, but that is because President Rushmore was so very popular. But Saddam, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and others have all been torn down not long after being erected, comparatively speaking.
Africa has a dirth of symbolic buildings, other than the Pyramid and other Egyptian, Roman and Arabic stuff. There is this huge church built in the Cote d'Ivoire, and now this thing in Senegal. I am guessing that it will grow on people unless it becomes a symbol of the fools that spent all that money on it, or some nutzoid regime comes to power and sells it for scrap.
Yes, I know, there was no President Rushmore. All the presidents were conveniently dead for a nice interval when Mt Rushmore was carved.
My favorite stature story was the one about this Honduran art aficionado that was sent off to Paris by his buddy the president to bring back a statue of Francisco Morazan, the hero of Central American independence. When he got to Paris in the 1880's, this guy discovered that he really liked the place: he liked the women, the wine, the nightclubs, and eventually he pissed away a lot of the money. So he bought an equestrian statue of the French Marshall Ney at a nice discount in the Flea Market, had a different head made for it, and came back to Tegucigalpa with it, where it stands to this day. Of course, there are some who deny this story, but most Hondurans think it is true. It is a better story than other statues have, anyway. If not for the legend, it would be a lot less fun to talk about it.
I found Montevideo impressive, because Uruguayans have chosen only to seriously celebrate one national hero, Jose Gervasio Artigas, but they have numerous parks dedicated to a lot of other figures from other countries: Jose Marti, Franklin D Roosevelt, Bernardo O'Higgins, Bartolome Mitre, Simon Bolivar. There is a really nice equestrian statue of Artigas in the Plaza de la Independencia in Montevideo.
