The Failure of Public Art

The Failure of Public Art

"What Happens when American Art Goes Public" by Peter Plagens, in New England Review (Summer 1995), Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt. 05753.

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"What Happens when American Art Goes Public" by Peter Plagens, in New England Review (Summer 1995), Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt. 05753.

Works of "public art" are everywhere to be and lobbies. But whether sponsored by govseen these days, from downtown plazas and ernments, universities, or corporations, college campuses to office-building lawns argues Plagens, who is a painter and art critic, public art usually doesn’t work: either it displeases the public (or some angry, mobilized faction), or it simply is not good art.

Over the last dozen years, he says, most of the sculptures and other works of public art he has seen have fit the latter category. They are "arty but not too arty, playful but not too playful, colorful but not too colorful, and avant-garde but not too avant-garde." In short: mediocre. The "demi-sculptures" and "glorified benches" that have been materializing in America’s public spaces are like "Fisher-Price toys for white-collar adults: you can walk on them, climb on them, play on them, and eat lunch on them," yet "for all their putatively progressive social trappings" they are "boring and even silly."

Unlike older public art by Alexander Calder and other artists, who exhibited mainly in galleries and museums, many of the new monuments are the work of artists who have left the studio behind. They go "from arts council to arts council, municipality to municipality, state to state...in answer to calls for public works of art." The resulting public art frequently is "compromised and tepid."

Two works of public art that succeeded as art, in Plagens’s view, prove the rule. Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.—"probably the best 20th-century work of public art in America"—is regarded as a great success. But when Lin’s design was criticized as dishonoring those who had fought, Frederick Hart’s more traditional sculpture of three soldiers was added, Plagens points out. "The society that commissioned [Lin’s work] could not drink it down full." The lesson is even clearer in the case of Richard Serra’s "Tilted Arc," a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high wall of brown, stained steel that was placed in Foley Plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1981. So loud were the howls of protest from federal workers who used the plaza that the offending work (for which the government had paid $175,000) was eventually removed (at a cost of $50,000). Some critics blamed the debacle on the arrogant artist, but Plagens believes that "Tilted Arc" failed as public art chiefly because it worked as art: its "real sin was to disturb."