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Dreamwidth is apparently 13 today. So here's a bloggy post I'd been thinking of making at some point. (For the tag, see this orientation post about the original community ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
three_weeks_for_dw and the new 3weeks4dreamwidth.)
The slab in the photo above is the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building in Lower Manhattan. It was built in 1963–69 and walls off the formerly open end of Foley Square, around which various imposing courthouses are grouped. It's actually across Centre Street (invisible running parallel to the base of the building), which at that point forms a little triangle that's been developed in recent years into a small park with trees and benches, but is often lumped in with the Foley Square complex; which was built on the site of Five Points, one of the most notoriously crime-ridden slums in the world.
No idea why it took so long to finish the snazzy building with its eye-watering facade patterning, but of course within 10 years it was too small, and a glass extension was added on one side (Kahn & Jacobs was involved in both). At that time the Feds decided to add a piece of public art in the plaza, Federal Plaza, that's in front of the main entrance (the photo shows that side of the building in summer 2010). The General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture program gave the commission to the hot-shot Richard Serra, then 41, whose works ran to large panels of steel that would weather in-place.
The result was Tilted Arc.
The photo is taken from a retrospective on federally sponsored public art, where the outraged reaction to it is discussed soon after the negative public reaction to Isamu Noguchi's Landscape of Time, a curated group of boulders installed in 1975 in front of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in Seattle. Also included are Calder's Flamingo in Chicago, which is beloved and has apparently been so since its installation in 1974.
A collection of essays from the perspective of modern artists (The Trials of Art, edited by Daniel McClean) contains an essay by Christina Michalos with the title "Murdering Art: Destruction of Art Works and Artists' Moral Rights" that quotes Serra's statement of intent: "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." However, what this is really saying in art speak is that anyone wanting to enter or leave the building was forced to walk around Serra's massive wall of rusting steel; they couldn't see around it or over it, he dictated a detour for the experience of interaction with the sculpture. It was a giant "Obey me" sign. From the perspective of people trying to cross the plaza, it might as well have been a fire-hose blasting water at them, or a giant billboard depicting the artist giving them the finger. It wasn't just that it was ugly; it was inherently contemptuous and in-your-face. The workers in the building, who had to go around this thing on their way to and from their jobs and in many cases also to and from lunch, started a petition to have it removed. In 1985, there was an actual public hearing, and after an actual lawsuit and appeal by Serra, in 1989 it was actually cut up and removed under cover of night; it remains in a warehouse, because Serra is (understandably) adamant that it was a site-specific work and cannot be reinstalled or recreated anywhere else.
The arterati were unsympathetic from the start to the complaints, glomming onto the argument that the sculpture was ugly, which was only part of it, although also understandable: Serra's style, like that of many modern artists, especially large-form sculptors, mocks the concept of beauty. A considerably less sympathetic book by Michael Kammen, Visual Shock, notes that Serra is in many respects the poster boy for the hypocrisy of artists who profit from public commissions while pouring scorn on the idea of public art being a benefit to the public. Apparently the term "Plop Art" was coined specifically in reaction to Serra's public art, and Kammen notes that he has continued to receive more than his share of lucrative public commissions while continuing to complain of "censorship" of art in the US. (One particularly illustrative instance, in St. Louis: Serra's Twain, a nominally "parklike" installation near the Gateway Arch that pretty much imprisons people—they have 30" spaces between his steel plates to look out through—survived despite protests, but someone else's group of trees on a mound surrounded by formal gardens was bulldozed on a local official's sole authority that it was "ugly.")
I am aware that open performance of épater les bourgeois is de rigueur for the majority of modern artists to maintain their cred, especially those who take money from "The Man". I am aware that rationales are required for modern sculptures, and usually boil down to "I will make the viewer engage with this object." My first reaction on hearing about the conflict, many, many years ago, came from a place of enjoying pop art and surrealism, finding the traditional stuffy style of public monument to be stuffy clutter, and welcoming the exuberant variety of modern public sculpture, from Rodin's portrait of Balzac in what looks like a bathrobe through pretty much any Calder to the weird black and white mushrooms and red cubes that had been sprouting on streets and in front of buildings in NYC. (The cube is Noguchi again, in a much more playful vein. I don't like zen gardens, I admit it. The mushrooms are apparently officially trees. By Jean Dubuffet.) I indeed thought of it as an artistic freedom issue. I wasn't thinking about those workers; and as my then boyfriend pointed out at the time, Federal office positions are a traditional path to financial security and upward mobility for minorities in the US, so Serra was very much not punching up, or even making lawyers and lobbyists think about something other than money as they tried to get into the building, he was first and foremost gut-punching the very ordinary folks who worked in the building and surely had a right to go get a sandwich from the food truck at lunchtime without having to dodge around his intentionally unignorable public message.
The openly elitist statements on behalf of Serra didn't help his case: Kammen summarizes: "[V]irtually all of Serra's defenders and apologists 'openly ridiculed the idea of a public art rooted in democratic processes'" and gives this example from a spokesperson for the GSA itself: "You go to an expert for medical advice; you go to a legal expert for advice about the law. We go to experts for real estate and gardening. Yet when it comes to art, it seems they want the local gas station attendant in on things." But perhaps the most damaging statements came from Serra himself, who appears to have felt compelled to present himself as a dick-waver. Kammen: "During the early years of the controversy Serra repeatedly questioned the 'weird notion that sculpture should somehow serve what are being called 'human needs.'" A PBS article quotes him: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. ... Art is not democratic. It is not for the people."
The events still rankle within the art establishment. In 2019, in an article titled "Richard Serra Is Carrying the Weight of the World", a New York Times art critic whined: "But even in its dismantled condition, 'Tilted Arc' continues to distort Mr. Serra's reputation, fostering an image of an artist who set out to taunt the public. It is true that his great innovation was to redefine sculpture by making it look less like a polished object on a pedestal than an off-putting incursion into the viewer's space. On the other hand, not nearly enough has been said about the protective or sheltering aspect of Mr. Serra’s work. His sculptures often contain openings that allow you to enter them and linger unseen, to hide. It’s as if Mr. Serra is trying to bridge two poles, to create an aura of danger and then banish it in short order." (Translation: It was art! It was meant to be a horrible experience! And he does different kinds of pushing people around now, not just that kind!") Although a year later, in an article on another sculptor titled "What's That on the Met's Roof Garden? A Big, Beautiful Wall", a different critic shows some sympathy, at least: "The wall’s curve, and its play of transparency and bulk, brings to mind another, earlier wall-like sculpture, Richard Serra's 1981 'Tilted Arc.' The Serra piece was also curved and free-standing, but fully, interruptively solid. Twelve feet high and cast in dark Corten steel, it bisected the plaza outside the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. Office workers who crossed the space daily objected to the work from the start: to its intrusive, path-altering mass and to what some saw as its adamant ugliness."
There's a fair point lurking here about democracy; if there's going to be public art, somebody has to decide what to have. Kammen quotes Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker: "Art cannot be determined by voice votes, majority rule or democratic dialogues. By its very nature, the selection of art is subjective—and for better or worse elitist." But "elitist" here is actually missing the point, which is neither the merits of taste nor that direct democracy is unlikely to work in these cases. Kammen approvingly compares situations where artists reluctantly changed their plans after public backlash so that they would at least be able to put up something; and this gentle assessment that the problem was that Serra didn't tell people first also misses it. Serra wanted to insult and inconvenience everybody. That was the intention of the piece. That's what the GSA commissioned, whether anybody asked him what he planned to create or not, and I can't believe they didn't expect something of the kind. As David Hopkins puts it in After Modern Art: 1945–2017 (part of the Oxford History of Art): "Serra's provocative intervention in the space ... compelled pedestrians to change direction and follow his sculpture's trajectory". That might be cute in an exhibition space, like the Met's exterior sculpture display areas (and the curators are paid to take it day in and day out), but nobody appears to have confronted the issue of that's being the purpose of a piece of public art stuck in front of the door of a public building. Except Nathan Glazer, writing in 1992 in The Public Interest, in a piece titled "Subverting the Context": "[Serra was] attacking the awful by increasing the awfulness. To the misery of working in an ugly and poorly designed building, it was Serra's thought to add additional misery in the form of a sculpture that was ugly to most people ... that obstructed the plaza, that offered no space to sit on, that blocked sun and view, and made the plaza unusable even for those moments of freedom when the weather permitted office workers to eat their lunch outside." (And I'm not sure about the workers regarding the building as "ugly and poorly designed", or that the workers had hoped to be able to eat their lunch in the plaza outside the building. It was a bare expanse of flagstones before the steel encumbrance went in.)
That crux about how plaza users were treated was also obscured by the government's making it into a security issue. Hopkins: "The critic Douglas Crimp drew attention to aspects of the state's [that is, the federal government's] case against Tilted Arc, which claimed that it ran the risk of deflecting explosions onto government buildings opposite and impeded adequate surveillance of the area beyond. Such, he noted, were the state's expectations of the public." That's obviously eye-rolling; but arguing on that basis that it was inappropriate for the site may have been the only way to overcome the "It's art. Take your medicine" argument.
Of course, 10 years after that argument was made, in 1995, somebody who hated the Feds bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Also, in 1990, the year after Tilted Arc was finally removed, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. You can't see it in the pic at the top of this page, but the plaza is up a bunch of stairs from the street. It's over the parking garage; and the steps may also have been thought of as a deterrent to over-use by the public. Here it is in 2009.
That's what replaced Tilted Arc: a 1997 installation by landscape artist Martha Schwartz incorporating pale green benches in winding patterns, hemispherical grass mounds (later replaced with topiary), bright orange trash cans, and I believe the plaza itself was purple. The benches and the mounds, looking maltreated, can actually be seen at the bottom of the first pic, when you know what you're looking for. (Here it is embiggenable.)
But that fun stuff's gone now. Here's what replaced it: Michael Van Valkenburgh redid the plaza again, completed in 2013, and won an award. He's kept (and taken credit for) the trees, replaced the mounds with sort of crescent-shaped plantings, put in lots of seating especially huge bollards with inset lighting (I can't help thinking they're mainly a passive security device in case someone drives a truck up the steps), and the images envisage a much more active use of the space. I can almost hear the music. The idea was nominally to make immigrants coming out of the building after citizenship ceremonies feel happy, but I think the difference says more about different conceptions of how people use park space: checking their phones, skateboarding, making and enjoying noise, as opposed to sitting and eating sandwiches. Times change. What cements this redo in my mind as a bad change, though, is the plaza surface: it now proudly echoes the patterning on the facade of Glazer's "ugly and poorly designed building." Barmy.
That of course raises the whole issue of public spaces. The New York Times has decades of coverage of how (a) miserable and (b) restricted or actually closed to the public those "Privately Owned Public Spaces" are that got commercial towers 20% more permitted floor space in Manhattan. I found a few over the past couple of decades: 2008, they're made hard to access, in some cases even locked; 2015, they're "uninviting" and "do little to enhance the streetscape" (city official, there); 2015, once again, they're made hard to access, in some cases even locked; and of course there's the broader issue of "hostile architecture": street furniture and sides of buildings designed to make "lounging" difficult. Not exactly a surprise, especially in Manhattan. I was struck by how often the people the reporters talked to expressed the wish for a tree or two. Apparently the "public" plazas don't have any; although I recall one indoor public space that was planted with an urban forest to squeeze out people gathering there. New York City. It's a constant battle between the users (and abusers) and the building managers with their curated "images". But it's important to remember that the Jacob K. Javits Building is Federal. The argument about paying good money for a 12' rusty steel wall or a collection of rocks is more urgent when it's Federal income-tax dollars being spent, and by 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts was being sued by Robert Mapplethorpe and others for philistinism. And that plaza was always going to be there, it wasn't a sop to the public in exchange for a bigger building. It also faces a little park and a big formal square with a fountain sculpture.
So the issues with Federal Plaza cut right to the core of how the public gets treated, and how to make art something nice rather than just a cash cow for the likes of Serra, or a demonstration of how art-savvy the government is (which is what I think Van Valkenburgh's revamp is).
three_weeks_for_dw and the new 3weeks4dreamwidth.)The slab in the photo above is the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building in Lower Manhattan. It was built in 1963–69 and walls off the formerly open end of Foley Square, around which various imposing courthouses are grouped. It's actually across Centre Street (invisible running parallel to the base of the building), which at that point forms a little triangle that's been developed in recent years into a small park with trees and benches, but is often lumped in with the Foley Square complex; which was built on the site of Five Points, one of the most notoriously crime-ridden slums in the world.
No idea why it took so long to finish the snazzy building with its eye-watering facade patterning, but of course within 10 years it was too small, and a glass extension was added on one side (Kahn & Jacobs was involved in both). At that time the Feds decided to add a piece of public art in the plaza, Federal Plaza, that's in front of the main entrance (the photo shows that side of the building in summer 2010). The General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture program gave the commission to the hot-shot Richard Serra, then 41, whose works ran to large panels of steel that would weather in-place.
The result was Tilted Arc.
The photo is taken from a retrospective on federally sponsored public art, where the outraged reaction to it is discussed soon after the negative public reaction to Isamu Noguchi's Landscape of Time, a curated group of boulders installed in 1975 in front of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in Seattle. Also included are Calder's Flamingo in Chicago, which is beloved and has apparently been so since its installation in 1974.
A collection of essays from the perspective of modern artists (The Trials of Art, edited by Daniel McClean) contains an essay by Christina Michalos with the title "Murdering Art: Destruction of Art Works and Artists' Moral Rights" that quotes Serra's statement of intent: "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." However, what this is really saying in art speak is that anyone wanting to enter or leave the building was forced to walk around Serra's massive wall of rusting steel; they couldn't see around it or over it, he dictated a detour for the experience of interaction with the sculpture. It was a giant "Obey me" sign. From the perspective of people trying to cross the plaza, it might as well have been a fire-hose blasting water at them, or a giant billboard depicting the artist giving them the finger. It wasn't just that it was ugly; it was inherently contemptuous and in-your-face. The workers in the building, who had to go around this thing on their way to and from their jobs and in many cases also to and from lunch, started a petition to have it removed. In 1985, there was an actual public hearing, and after an actual lawsuit and appeal by Serra, in 1989 it was actually cut up and removed under cover of night; it remains in a warehouse, because Serra is (understandably) adamant that it was a site-specific work and cannot be reinstalled or recreated anywhere else.
The arterati were unsympathetic from the start to the complaints, glomming onto the argument that the sculpture was ugly, which was only part of it, although also understandable: Serra's style, like that of many modern artists, especially large-form sculptors, mocks the concept of beauty. A considerably less sympathetic book by Michael Kammen, Visual Shock, notes that Serra is in many respects the poster boy for the hypocrisy of artists who profit from public commissions while pouring scorn on the idea of public art being a benefit to the public. Apparently the term "Plop Art" was coined specifically in reaction to Serra's public art, and Kammen notes that he has continued to receive more than his share of lucrative public commissions while continuing to complain of "censorship" of art in the US. (One particularly illustrative instance, in St. Louis: Serra's Twain, a nominally "parklike" installation near the Gateway Arch that pretty much imprisons people—they have 30" spaces between his steel plates to look out through—survived despite protests, but someone else's group of trees on a mound surrounded by formal gardens was bulldozed on a local official's sole authority that it was "ugly.")
I am aware that open performance of épater les bourgeois is de rigueur for the majority of modern artists to maintain their cred, especially those who take money from "The Man". I am aware that rationales are required for modern sculptures, and usually boil down to "I will make the viewer engage with this object." My first reaction on hearing about the conflict, many, many years ago, came from a place of enjoying pop art and surrealism, finding the traditional stuffy style of public monument to be stuffy clutter, and welcoming the exuberant variety of modern public sculpture, from Rodin's portrait of Balzac in what looks like a bathrobe through pretty much any Calder to the weird black and white mushrooms and red cubes that had been sprouting on streets and in front of buildings in NYC. (The cube is Noguchi again, in a much more playful vein. I don't like zen gardens, I admit it. The mushrooms are apparently officially trees. By Jean Dubuffet.) I indeed thought of it as an artistic freedom issue. I wasn't thinking about those workers; and as my then boyfriend pointed out at the time, Federal office positions are a traditional path to financial security and upward mobility for minorities in the US, so Serra was very much not punching up, or even making lawyers and lobbyists think about something other than money as they tried to get into the building, he was first and foremost gut-punching the very ordinary folks who worked in the building and surely had a right to go get a sandwich from the food truck at lunchtime without having to dodge around his intentionally unignorable public message.
The openly elitist statements on behalf of Serra didn't help his case: Kammen summarizes: "[V]irtually all of Serra's defenders and apologists 'openly ridiculed the idea of a public art rooted in democratic processes'" and gives this example from a spokesperson for the GSA itself: "You go to an expert for medical advice; you go to a legal expert for advice about the law. We go to experts for real estate and gardening. Yet when it comes to art, it seems they want the local gas station attendant in on things." But perhaps the most damaging statements came from Serra himself, who appears to have felt compelled to present himself as a dick-waver. Kammen: "During the early years of the controversy Serra repeatedly questioned the 'weird notion that sculpture should somehow serve what are being called 'human needs.'" A PBS article quotes him: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. ... Art is not democratic. It is not for the people."
The events still rankle within the art establishment. In 2019, in an article titled "Richard Serra Is Carrying the Weight of the World", a New York Times art critic whined: "But even in its dismantled condition, 'Tilted Arc' continues to distort Mr. Serra's reputation, fostering an image of an artist who set out to taunt the public. It is true that his great innovation was to redefine sculpture by making it look less like a polished object on a pedestal than an off-putting incursion into the viewer's space. On the other hand, not nearly enough has been said about the protective or sheltering aspect of Mr. Serra’s work. His sculptures often contain openings that allow you to enter them and linger unseen, to hide. It’s as if Mr. Serra is trying to bridge two poles, to create an aura of danger and then banish it in short order." (Translation: It was art! It was meant to be a horrible experience! And he does different kinds of pushing people around now, not just that kind!") Although a year later, in an article on another sculptor titled "What's That on the Met's Roof Garden? A Big, Beautiful Wall", a different critic shows some sympathy, at least: "The wall’s curve, and its play of transparency and bulk, brings to mind another, earlier wall-like sculpture, Richard Serra's 1981 'Tilted Arc.' The Serra piece was also curved and free-standing, but fully, interruptively solid. Twelve feet high and cast in dark Corten steel, it bisected the plaza outside the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. Office workers who crossed the space daily objected to the work from the start: to its intrusive, path-altering mass and to what some saw as its adamant ugliness."
There's a fair point lurking here about democracy; if there's going to be public art, somebody has to decide what to have. Kammen quotes Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker: "Art cannot be determined by voice votes, majority rule or democratic dialogues. By its very nature, the selection of art is subjective—and for better or worse elitist." But "elitist" here is actually missing the point, which is neither the merits of taste nor that direct democracy is unlikely to work in these cases. Kammen approvingly compares situations where artists reluctantly changed their plans after public backlash so that they would at least be able to put up something; and this gentle assessment that the problem was that Serra didn't tell people first also misses it. Serra wanted to insult and inconvenience everybody. That was the intention of the piece. That's what the GSA commissioned, whether anybody asked him what he planned to create or not, and I can't believe they didn't expect something of the kind. As David Hopkins puts it in After Modern Art: 1945–2017 (part of the Oxford History of Art): "Serra's provocative intervention in the space ... compelled pedestrians to change direction and follow his sculpture's trajectory". That might be cute in an exhibition space, like the Met's exterior sculpture display areas (and the curators are paid to take it day in and day out), but nobody appears to have confronted the issue of that's being the purpose of a piece of public art stuck in front of the door of a public building. Except Nathan Glazer, writing in 1992 in The Public Interest, in a piece titled "Subverting the Context": "[Serra was] attacking the awful by increasing the awfulness. To the misery of working in an ugly and poorly designed building, it was Serra's thought to add additional misery in the form of a sculpture that was ugly to most people ... that obstructed the plaza, that offered no space to sit on, that blocked sun and view, and made the plaza unusable even for those moments of freedom when the weather permitted office workers to eat their lunch outside." (And I'm not sure about the workers regarding the building as "ugly and poorly designed", or that the workers had hoped to be able to eat their lunch in the plaza outside the building. It was a bare expanse of flagstones before the steel encumbrance went in.)
That crux about how plaza users were treated was also obscured by the government's making it into a security issue. Hopkins: "The critic Douglas Crimp drew attention to aspects of the state's [that is, the federal government's] case against Tilted Arc, which claimed that it ran the risk of deflecting explosions onto government buildings opposite and impeded adequate surveillance of the area beyond. Such, he noted, were the state's expectations of the public." That's obviously eye-rolling; but arguing on that basis that it was inappropriate for the site may have been the only way to overcome the "It's art. Take your medicine" argument.
Of course, 10 years after that argument was made, in 1995, somebody who hated the Feds bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Also, in 1990, the year after Tilted Arc was finally removed, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. You can't see it in the pic at the top of this page, but the plaza is up a bunch of stairs from the street. It's over the parking garage; and the steps may also have been thought of as a deterrent to over-use by the public. Here it is in 2009.
That's what replaced Tilted Arc: a 1997 installation by landscape artist Martha Schwartz incorporating pale green benches in winding patterns, hemispherical grass mounds (later replaced with topiary), bright orange trash cans, and I believe the plaza itself was purple. The benches and the mounds, looking maltreated, can actually be seen at the bottom of the first pic, when you know what you're looking for. (Here it is embiggenable.)
But that fun stuff's gone now. Here's what replaced it: Michael Van Valkenburgh redid the plaza again, completed in 2013, and won an award. He's kept (and taken credit for) the trees, replaced the mounds with sort of crescent-shaped plantings, put in lots of seating especially huge bollards with inset lighting (I can't help thinking they're mainly a passive security device in case someone drives a truck up the steps), and the images envisage a much more active use of the space. I can almost hear the music. The idea was nominally to make immigrants coming out of the building after citizenship ceremonies feel happy, but I think the difference says more about different conceptions of how people use park space: checking their phones, skateboarding, making and enjoying noise, as opposed to sitting and eating sandwiches. Times change. What cements this redo in my mind as a bad change, though, is the plaza surface: it now proudly echoes the patterning on the facade of Glazer's "ugly and poorly designed building." Barmy.
That of course raises the whole issue of public spaces. The New York Times has decades of coverage of how (a) miserable and (b) restricted or actually closed to the public those "Privately Owned Public Spaces" are that got commercial towers 20% more permitted floor space in Manhattan. I found a few over the past couple of decades: 2008, they're made hard to access, in some cases even locked; 2015, they're "uninviting" and "do little to enhance the streetscape" (city official, there); 2015, once again, they're made hard to access, in some cases even locked; and of course there's the broader issue of "hostile architecture": street furniture and sides of buildings designed to make "lounging" difficult. Not exactly a surprise, especially in Manhattan. I was struck by how often the people the reporters talked to expressed the wish for a tree or two. Apparently the "public" plazas don't have any; although I recall one indoor public space that was planted with an urban forest to squeeze out people gathering there. New York City. It's a constant battle between the users (and abusers) and the building managers with their curated "images". But it's important to remember that the Jacob K. Javits Building is Federal. The argument about paying good money for a 12' rusty steel wall or a collection of rocks is more urgent when it's Federal income-tax dollars being spent, and by 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts was being sued by Robert Mapplethorpe and others for philistinism. And that plaza was always going to be there, it wasn't a sop to the public in exchange for a bigger building. It also faces a little park and a big formal square with a fountain sculpture.
So the issues with Federal Plaza cut right to the core of how the public gets treated, and how to make art something nice rather than just a cash cow for the likes of Serra, or a demonstration of how art-savvy the government is (which is what I think Van Valkenburgh's revamp is).
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Thoughts
*laugh* I am reminded of the chapter in Deep Time that discusses how to communicate, on a scale of tens of thousands of years, the message, "Stay away from this dangerous garbage." A whole category of proposals concerned structures designed to disgust and repel humans.
>> Apparently the term "Plop Art" was coined specifically in reaction to Serra's public art <<
Oh, well struck!
>> "I will make the viewer engage with this object." <<
This is the philosophy of the graffiti artist.
>> "Art cannot be determined by voice votes, majority rule or democratic dialogues.<<
Bullshit. Any group can do it. You pass an inventory of available art, or a catalog, and whatever the most people like goes up. Or you can appoint an art committee with rotating members, so different folks get a say and nobody gets bored. Some coffeehouses hang local art, and often the staff votes on which artist or works to feature. Every couple with sense negotiates what art will hang where in the home. My boho wall rug is in my office and my partner's collection of magic posters and animation art is in his, with an assortment of mutual favorites in the shared rooms.
>> By its very nature, the selection of art is subjective—and for better or worse elitist." <<
Also bullshit. There are plenty of objective parameters for art, and almost all installations use some -- things like "We hang pictures between sizes X and Y," "We only hang rectangular frames," "We don't hang artistic nudes in a family establishment," "We choose works whose color scheme looks good in our decor," etc.
Art doesn't have to be elitist either. Some is actively anti-elitist, like boho and graffiti art. I'm a big fan of trains as a rolling gallery of free-to-view public art. That this pisses off elitists is a source of amusement to me. A number of astute people have dealt with a 'graffiti problem' by inviting a local expert to cover their wall(s) with a masterpiece, because usually nobody will dare to slash that. And the owner doesn't even have to pay for the paint!
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Re: Thoughts
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> "...his great innovation was to redefine sculpture by making it look less like a polished object on a pedestal than an off-putting incursion into the viewer's space."
This quote really got to me because it's just so flabbergasting to me that anyone would look at the world we live in and decide to actively make it more unpleasant and difficult. Who is out there thinking that's what we need? Either now or in the 1980s? It strikes me as so incredibly selfish, to think your art warrants making the world uglier and more difficult to navigate.
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Public "art" that hurts or inconveniences people isn't "art", it's junk.
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100% agree.