Maybe abstraction is exactly the least effective approach?

Incisive discussion at Nancy Levinson's Pixel Points about Eisenman's Holocaust Abstraction:

Clearly Ouroussoff believes the memorial to be a compelling work of art, and just as clearly he credits the project with carrying an enormous burden of historical significance. But while his arguments for its aesthetic success seem to me persuasive (and make me eager to see the work), his claims for its commemorative power are much less convincing.

For as I read the critic's account of his response to the memorial I couldn't help but wonder: to what extent does this sort of sensitive reading, this nuanced and detailed interpretation, require considerable prior knowledge? Ouroussoff tells us that he became disoriented as he wandered among the grid of closely spaced pillars, and that his unease evoked for him passages from Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, passages that describe the despair and dehumanization of the camps. But what if a visitor to the memorial hasn't read Primo Levi's account of his ten months in a labor camp? Or indeed much of anything about the Holocaust? What if a visitor is among the fifty percent of Britons who — as the alarmingly informative web site of the History News Network tells us — have somehow never heard of Auschwitz? To the visitor who knows nothing of the Final Solution, the project's vast grid will say nothing about the Nazi death camps — likely as not it will be mainly a stop on a day's tour of Berlin, an hour or two between morning in the Tiergarten and lunch on the Unter den Linden. And even for those who might already know a great deal about the history being commemorated, it seems likely that this exceedingly abstract construction will depend for its specific effects upon its title. If you stumbled upon a five-acre field of 2,711 concrete pillars and didn't know that it was intended to be a "memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe," would it really communicate to you "the scope of the Holocaust's horrors"? (italics added - DS)

Match to Levinson? She's pretty persuasive. How can you commemorate a specific event when the imagery used could apply to anything? I guess one could respond by arguing that even the most representational sculpture -- say the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima - requires some knowledge to be understood. I don't know. Ourossoff claimed that abstraction was the best way; I really didn't even pick up on the flaw in that logic i.e.if it's so abstract that you don't know what is being represented, don't you defeat yourself before you even start? So read Levinson's post for yourself -- I'd be curious to hear your thinking on whether there is an inherent limitation to the use of abstraction in commemoration.