Memorandum

To: Colleagues From: Peter Levine (405-4767) Re: CP4 Workshop

April 23, 2001

Attached is the paper for the next CP4 workshop:

"Public Art, Public Outcry: The Scandalous Sculptures of Jacob Epstein and Richard Serra"

Caroline Levine, English Department, Rutgers University/Camden

May 3, 12:30 to 2pm, in the Humanities Dean's Conference Room, 1102 Francis Scott Key Hall

Abstract: What kind of art belongs in public spaces? Who speaks for the “public” in controversies over public space? In 1925, Rima, a sculpture by Jacob Epstein, was installed in Hyde Park in London. An avant-garde relief, the sculpture became the focus of public controversy for almost a decade—both reviled and defended in the tabloids, disparaged in the House of Commons, extolled by art critics, and defaced three times by vandals who scrawled “Jew” and “Bolshevist” across it. Taken by some as a proof of England's innovative role in the art world and by others as the subversive work of a foreigner, Rima became the emblem of a dispute over the national character of British art. Sixty years later and across the ocean, a comparable quarrel played itself out, and this time with more troubling consequences for the art work. In the early 1980s, Richard Serra's sculpture, Tilted Arc, appeared in Federal Plaza in New York City. It was a tall, curving steel wall that bisected the plaza, transforming the public space—and, some said, ruining it for the public. Protests became increasingly forceful, and eventually, after a hearing, the sculpture was demolished. Tilted Arc, like Rima, came to embody competing ideas of the community that had allowed the object to enter its space. Taken together, these two cases suggest that public art functions not only as a reshaping and adornment of public space, but as a representation of the public itself. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 1

Public Art, Public Outcry: The Scandalous Sculpture of Jacob Epstein and Richard Serra

Caroline Levine, Rutgers University

In the twentieth century, hardly a year went by without some public uproar over art. In the past fifteen years in America, the most famous of the upheavals were the National Endowment for the

Arts controversy, the trials of rap groups 2 Live Crew and Ice T, and, as the century reached its very end, the Brooklyn Museum scandal. Since the courts have defined art as a form of speech, these debates have largely raised familiar policy questions not limited to the art world: what is the proper relationship between free speech and the public good? Are there particular kinds of speech that are particularly injurious to the public? Should taxpayers pay for speech that offends minority beliefs or identities?

These questions have a long and intricate history, and as a cultural critic, I do not aim to shed light on central issues of First Amendment law or political philosophy. But I do want to suggest that governments for the past hundred years have had to grapple with public policy questions that are specific to the arts. These are the questions that arose in the wake of the Modernist avant-garde, a set of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic movements that were proud of their rejection of both officially sanctioned academic art and mass culture, assigning the highest moral and aesthetic value to the art that satisfied the smallest audience. They claimed authenticity only for the art that challenged familiar and conventional tastes. “Public art” became something of an oxymoron in a context where art deliberately flouted public approval. Yet Western governments continued to exhibit, protect, and commission works of art throughout the twentieth century, citing the value of art for national edification, identity, and pride. Thus art policy found itself continually split. If artists insisted that the only genuine art was that which defied public expectations, democracies had to reconcile an official respect for art with an art world that deliberately resisted the tastes and preferences of both state institutions and the voting majority.

Two controversies make my case: the first, Jacob Epstein’s Rima, a memorial to the writer

William Henry Hudson, erected in 1925 for London’s Hyde Park; the second, Tilted Arc, a Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 2 monumental piece created by Richard Serra in 1981 for Federal Plaza in Manhattan. Both Rima and

Tilted Arc were designed specifically for public spaces. Both prompted immediate and vociferous outcry. But neither was obscene, violent, or offensive on grounds of race, religion, sex, or sexuality. Neither could be said to cause injury, corrupt the innocent, endanger the community, or threaten the status quo. Neither controversy could be said to be about harm. What was at stake in both cases was a matter of style, of aesthetic preference, of taste. Public outcry in both cases revolved around what we might simply call “dislike.”

And dislike, these two cases suggest, is complex indeed. As we will see, some voices in the art world actually argued for the desirability of displeasing the public, citing “dislike” as an appropriate aim of public art. Art’s purpose was to unsettle and to upset. Others insisted that the majority was capable of appreciating the most esoteric works, and that it was important to educate the public out of their dislike. Politicians in both the Epstein and the Serra controversies

acknowledged the necessity of placating irritated voters, but they also refused to grant majority rule,

insisting that it would be absurd to call a referendum on aesthetics. Few argued for sheer numbers

when it came to art. Yet, without a referendum, both debates then ran into the problem of gauging the

extent and depth of public “dislike”: who would speak for the public? Was it the press, politicians, the courts? Even more troubling, which public mattered most? Was it the people who had to see the

work in order to conduct their daily affairs or was it the whole nation? Was it only those who had

paid for the work, or did the public include international visitors and future generations? National

identity played a conspicuous role in both public debates, with voices both for and against the art

object insisting that public art represented the nation to the rest of the world. And in both instances

we hear a great deal of insecurity about the wisdom of judging art in the present, since generations to

come might look back on naïve first impressions with contempt. Wracked by anxiety about the problem of a properly public aesthetic judgment, the two controversies reveal struggles over the

relationship between an elite art world and a larger public, over the weight and significance of

“dislike,” and over the value of public art in democratic nations. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 3

There once was a sculptor of mark

Who was chosen to brighten Hyde Park; Some thought his design

Most uncommonly fine,

But more liked it best in the dark.1

In 1922, friends and admirers of the novelist and naturalist William Henry Hudson gathered in

London to plan an appropriate memorial for their beloved writer. Best known for his novel, Green Mansions, Hudson had also penned an extraordinarily popular ornithological guide, The Birds of

London. But he was no Londoner himself: born in Argentina to parents who had come from the

United States, Hudson moved to England at the age of 29, and although he lived there for the rest of his life, never became an English citizen. Despite his foreign origins, however, Hudson’s English enthusiasts decided to build a memorial to him in one of London’s best known public spaces—Hyde

Park. The newly formed Hudson Memorial Committee agreed to invite the renowned sculptor Jacob

Epstein to design a medallion depicting Hudson to adorn a new bird sanctuary in the park. Jacob Epstein’s career up to that point had been controversial. He had come to England, like

Hudson, as an adult. Born to Jewish parents in New York, he had studied art as a young man in Paris before moving to London. In 1908, his series of statues outside the British Medical Association building in London brought charges of obscenity, charges which were repeated in 1912, when his memorial to Oscar Wilde in Paris was covered over by the authorities. His 1920 statue of “Christ” shocked conventional viewers with its rejection of traditional iconography, and indeed his stark

Modernist style startled many, who called it “hideous,” “barbaric,” “grotesque,” and “repulsive.” But although his work had provoked controversy in the past, Epstein was increasingly considered one of the best of England’s sculptors. One artist interviewed by The Daily News in 1925 called him “by far the greatest sculptor in the world,” and this was not the only voice to sing Epstein’s praises.2 The

Hudson Memorial Committee chose Epstein because, they said, they were “really anxious to give the

Nation a dignified piece of art.”3 Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 4

The committee’s proposal was at first rejected by the Office of Works because portraits are

not allowed in the Royal Parks. But although the government forbade portraits of living or historical

people, they approved “imaginary figures,” as the statue of Peter Pan already in Hyde Park made clear. So the Hudson Memorial Committee suggested an image of Rima, a character from Hudson’s

fictional Green Mansions. The committee described Rima as a “bright spirit in human form, so akin to wild Nature, yet endowed with such extraordinary intelligence,” and imagined that “such a theme would be in accordance with [Epstein’s] inclination.”4 Epstein duly produced a new sketch and a plaster model, and the committee submitted the plan. In 1924, they were informed that “the

Memorial had been accepted by His Majesty.”5 Work began immediately, and the piece was triumphantly unveiled on 19 May 1925 [fig. 1].

Figure 1: Epstein, Rima (1925)

Such a hue and cry followed the unveiling that one scholar has counted over two hundred articles and letters in London newspapers in 1925 alone.6 The conservative tabloid, The Daily Mail, led the onslaught, but the battle was not limited to the editorial page. The sculpture was defaced four times between 1925 and 1935, the last time by the Independent Fascist League, “which regarded it as an expression of the unholy alliance of Judaism and modernism.”7 There were caricatures of the Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 5 work in magazines, spoofs on stage in one London theater, petitions to remove the sculpture, two debates in the House of Commons, and even a fight between Epstein and one of his detractors in a

London restaurant. All over the British Isles reporters were outraged by the intrusion of Epstein’s work into the public sphere: “That isn’t Rima,” exclaimed The Yorkshire Evening Post. “That’s the soul of a … poulterer’s wife being conducted to hell by two frozen hen turkeys.”8 Epstein’s crime in this instance was not obscenity, or offense to religious tradition. Rima posed a different kind of threat: “a danger that if such things are encouraged or allowed to remain in our midst … the world will be made hideous.”9

“Hideousness” might seem like an unreliable category, dependent on shifting and unpredictable personal preference, but as the controversy unfolded it became clear that it had everything to do with the avant-garde. Letters to the press repeatedly bewailed Epstein’s rejection of traditional artistic styles, and particularly his refusal to imitate nature faithfully: they complained of the “malformed” figure of Rima, and declared that she was flanked by birds “unknown to the ornithologist.”10 On 25 May 1925, an angry citizen wrote: “God forbid that Woman’s form shall degenerate into such an unshapely mass. If this crude representation is called artistic perception, then what can be called ugly?”11 The twisting of natural and familiar shapes was fast becoming the hallmark of the new art. The Daily Mail argued that Rima was simply its most prominent illustration:

“a conspicuous example of the modern cult of ugliness.”12 And there were many who thought that

Rima distorted and disfigured in a deliberate effort to make the world hideous. Epstein’s work was only the latest example of this worrying new trend. “Beauty is being ignored,” claimed The Evening

Standard, “and it is a wrong atmosphere in which to allow a new generation to grow up.”13

As the debate wore on, “pretty” became a synonym for conservative art; “ugly” for

Modernism and the break from tradition.14 Strikingly, even Epstein’s admirers—and notably The Daily Mail’s own art critic was among these—relied on the opposition of pretty and ugly, using the repudiation of pretty art as a defense of Epstein’s work. The Daily Mail art critic wrote: “The fact is that Mr. Epstein has a sense of beauty which is inherent in the appropriate treatment of the material and in the rhythmic arrangement of plastic forms, but which takes no notice of the public craving for prettiness.”15 And The Daily News made a similar case, saying that Epstein “has made no Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 6 concessions to any popular desire for what is merely agreeable.”16 Here, the heroic artist bravely defies the “public craving for prettiness” and disregards the “popular desire for what is merely agreeable” in favor of a new and surprising kind of beauty. Surprisingly, then, the angry public and the avant-garde converged in their understanding of Epstein’s work as a departure from conventional standards of taste.

If the tabloids represented a mass public, and Epstein stood for the marginalized and shocking avant-garde, the official institutionalization of taste was housed in the Royal Academy of

Art. Slow to enter the battle, the Academy’s first volley was a powerful one. In November of 1925, the President of the Royal Academy drew up a petition demanding to have Rima removed.17 This petition called itself an “artists’ appeal,” and claimed to speak for English art. It was widely covered in the press. Epstein’s supporters immediately launched a counterattack, which they claimed was far more representative of “artistic and intellectual endeavour” than the first petition.18

Who really spoke for the art world? The Royal Academy held official status, but it was not clear in 1925 that it was still the most powerful authority on art. Indeed, art’s relation to public support and institutionalization was part of an ongoing battle for artistic legitimacy that had begun in the nineteenth century. In The Rules of Art, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the art world was increasingly characterized by a struggle for autonomy. After 1848, Bourdieu explains, some artists turned against the options offered to them as members of the bourgeoisie and tried to carve out a territory apart from politics, economics, and science, a territory that was to be marked by its independence from power and privilege. This new “game,” Bourdieu maintains, was paradoxical, since it represented “an interest in disinterestedness.”19 Flouting widespread recognition, official appreciation, and commercial success, these artists strove for a purer and more independent art, valuing less popular genres and styles over more popular ones, and less accepted, less recognizable art forms over more widely acknowledged ones. This meant that the field of art became a “force- field,” to use Bourdieu’s term, defined precisely by an ongoing struggle to establish an art of distance, detachment, indifference. In the effort to preserve artistic autonomy, artists vied with one another to flaunt their resistance to the marketplace, which resulted in a push toward ever-increasing innovation.20 The “academic” voice of art, officially sanctioned and bound to tradition, found itself Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 7 increasingly marginal, losing more and more ground to the rebellious avant-garde in debates about the arts. In both England and France, the avant-garde was proud of its anti-academic status, taking its identity precisely from the divergence of its experimental projects from the conventions of the academicians. Little-known groups of artists who had begun at the margins, proudly indifferent to prizes and markets, would gain ascendancy over more established figures, displacing them as the centers of the art world. But the more these groups became “consecrated,” the more their status as perfectly disinterested artists would be threatened, and they would soon be displaced by new marginal groups.21

In the controversy over Rima, the struggle that Bourdieu describes played itself out in exemplary fashion. The Royal Academy did not seek disinterested autonomy: it upheld traditional styles of representation and sought both official and collective approbation. Frank Dicksee, the

President of the Royal Academy, called for a return to conventional beauty in the press and insisted that “clean and healthy art” should replace Epstein’s Rima.22 John Collier, a painter who signed

Dicksee’s petition, condemned Rima for its deviation from proper norms—calling it a “perversion of the human form.”23 This normalizing view of art was repeatedly rejected by the avant-garde, who described academic art as “‘safe,’ dull, entirely undistinguished.”24 They praised Epstein for defying convention and mocked Rima’s critics as timorous and short-sighted: “Are we really to choose for

public memorials sculpture which displeases nobody but instructs nobody, or are we to have enough

courage to challenge the future?”25 The Nation accused Epstein’s detractors of being fuddy-

duddies—“elderly gentlemen” keen to ban anything that challenged their old-fashioned tastes.26 And

Epstein himself told The Daily News that he was not after popular or official success: “I do not work for the approval of others.”27

In the Rima controversy, these two groups came to represent the two poles of the art world, the Royal Academy standing for national authority and conventional taste, Epstein and his supporters representing the challenges of experimental art, pushing beyond the boundaries of the comfortable and the familiar to explore the challenging possibilities of the new. Since the Academy was in line with much of public taste, the avant-garde looked embattled and isolated.28 But as Bourdieu explains, this was no cause for regret: under attack, the Modernists could see themselves as both courageous Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 8 and authentic, rejecting comfortable, prudent, and familiar art in favor of inspired and imaginative greatness.

On one crucial issue, then, everyone seemed to agree. From the tabloids to the House of Commons and from the Royal Academy to the marginal avant-garde, all concurred that Epstein was deliberately defying public taste. The only question was whether this was a valuable or a destructive gesture in a public space. And the answer remains unresolved, since the avant-garde rejection of a mass public in the name of a noble and authentic art sparked a debate about the nature of public art that continues into our own time. If true art defies the public, what interest can the public have in the promotion and protection of art? The two sides in the Rima debate imagined starkly different roles for art in relation to tradition, to the nation, and to the people. The conservative Royal Academy and their followers were traditionalist in their aesthetics, favoring realism in art; they were nationalist, claiming to speak for

England and tradition of English art; and they were populist, insisting that art should be accessible to the mass of English viewers. The avant-garde, by contrast, championed artistic innovation; they were internationalist, claiming to speak for future generations and for global movements and influences, rather than for native English tradition; and they were elitist, snubbing the ordinary viewer as crude and uneducated.

At first glance, the union of art and politics in the Rima debate seems fairly consistent:

traditional art lends itself to nationalism and populism, while experimental art is allied with a

transnational elite. But art controversies make strange bedfellows. The elitist avant-garde, accused

many times of standing above the masses and refusing to gratify public taste, was also repeatedly

charged with socialism. As the right-wing Daily Mail put it in the Rima controversy: “The majority

of those who know the circumstances of the acceptance say the panel is an example of what we may expect if the Socialists ever get into power again and have control of our artistic destinies.

‘Bolshevism in art’ is an expression that has been freely applied by pilgrims to the memorial.”29 The

Evening News claimed that the Hudson Memorial showed a “sympathetic bias towards every movement within the scope of the ‘Left’ wing of political action.”30 But this position seems curiously

inconsistent: if socialism is the political attempt to unseat social and economic elites, the avant-garde Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 9 can be seen as a concerted attempt to produce aesthetic experiments unintelligible to the general public. And indeed, the press complained as much about Epstein’s elitism as his political radicalism, calling his “highbrow” rejection of public taste “a bad form of intellectual snobbery.”31 The marriage of left-wing politics and elitist art will of course sound familiar to those who followed the battle over the National Endowment for the Arts, since in the 1980s and 1990s conservatives in America echoed the anti-Epstein camp, shoring up their own populism by pointing to the union of radical politics and cultural elitism.32 But the conjoining of socialism and the avant- garde would have shocked the Soviet government of the 1920s and 1930s, which deliberately rejected experimental art as the pernicious expression of a bourgeois individualism. The Soviets embraced realism as the proper style for the people’s art and eventually convinced the United States

Government that avant-garde art not only ran contrary to socialist goals, but was the ideal manifestation of liberal capitalism.33

The Rima scandal thus poses one of the central questions surrounding public art in the twentieth century: namely, what is the relationship between aesthetic innovation and political upheaval? Does avant-garde novelty provoke its audiences to demand revolutionary change? Is it so aloof from ordinary life that it could only work to sustain the status quo? Or is artistic innovation simply separate from political innovation, harnessed as easily to conservative politics as to social change?

If modern art deliberately broke from the past—cutting its ties with tradition and celebrating each rupture as a victory—this break may have little ideological content in itself. Rejecting the status quo might at first seem an inherently progressive move, but the case of the Soviets suggests otherwise: once socialist goals were in the process of becoming realized, the avant-garde’s rejection of government-sponsored art no longer served recognizably left-wing political ends. And indeed, the logic of Modernist art seems successfully to have transcended the monolithic twentieth-century ideologies of the Cold War: striving always to produce the new and to violate and unsettle the old, the avant-garde upset both Right and Left in the twentieth century, claiming little in the way of a consistent politics other than its role as marginal, as other.34 Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 10

But the resolute marginality of modern art throws light on a more potent factor in the twentieth-century relationship between art and politics than the battle between Right and Left.

Although the avant-garde was not necessarily left-leaning in its political intentions, it unfailingly claimed the status of outsider—newcomer, outcast, or exile. Epstein was no exception. Deliberately departing from English conventions and institutions, Epstein’s Modernist experimentation seemed to nationalist voices to refuse all patriotic affiliation, all commitment to national tradition. Thus it is not surprising that his avant-garde work was consistently coupled with his Jewishness in the press, and perceived as undermining England and Englishness. The Hidden Hand, or the Jewish Peril, a fascist magazine that circulated in England in the twenties, argued that “the Jew Epstein [is making] a deliberate attempt… to influence our English public into admiration of something very different from what it has … admired in the past and so degrading it.”35 The Independent Fascist League scrawled on the Memorial: “God Save Our King and Britain from the Cancer of Judah.”36 By 1928, the more mainstream Saturday Review was characterizing Epstein’s aesthetic as symptomatic of his

Jewishness: “nearly all the support for violence rather than beauty in art [comes] from Socialists, foreigners, and Jews. Jacob Epstein’s name proclaims his nationality….”37

Although anti-Semitism was a violent force at work in the mid-twenties, it was not the only expression of nationalism alive in the Rima scandal: the press also condemned the Hudson Memorial as “Germanic,” “European,” “Assyrian,” “Oriental,” and “Egyptian.” One letter to The Times complained that Rima was “grotesquely out of harmony” with a “typically English public park.” 38

The Morning Post called the work “hideous, unnatural, un-English, and essentially unhealthy.” 39

And these objections were not limited to the popular press: Eric Underwood, writing a Short History of English Sculpture in 1933, refused to discuss Rima in the book because Epstein was “with us but not of us.”40 And even those who praised Epstein suggested that his work was forceful because it was “barbaric,” “wild,” “primitive,” and “natural” rather than typically English. Thus the avant-garde

style of Rima became something of a symbol of internationalism. Of course, this worldliness could

be an advantage: one letter to The Times painstakingly explained that Epstein’s work was

“thoroughly in keeping with the universal fashion in modern European sculpture” and urged readers

to see England as part of the world.41 While the Royal Academy sought to uphold national traditions, Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 11 avant-garde artists were ever more international in their own training and reputation, and thus they seemed less provincial than their academic counterparts; they garnered more international attention; and they brought together surprising influences from around the world that shocked English viewers with their newness and audacity. Put simply, then, the avant-garde Epstein was cosmopolitan—both detached from provincial and national identity and expressive of a worldly style and sophistication.

This conclusion returns us to our initial problem: the role of public art in the wake of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The Rima scandal suggests possible dangers in making “public” synonymous with “nation.” Nationalist sentiment could all too easily become the tyranny of racial or political majorities eager to drown out all marginal and minority voices, voices that avant-garde outsiders and exiles persistently represent. But then, if the public is not the national majority, which public, exactly, does public art serve? Should we imagine a more cosmopolitan, more diverse conception of the public—expanding to include the world? Or is such universal scope simply impossible to imagine, much less to embody in art? Perhaps our conception of the public should instead contract to include only those who must come into contact with the art work on a regular basis. This was the view expressed by one Londoner, who responded to the Parliamentary debate over Rima by wondering “how Cornwall and Scotland can feel keenly or appropriately on the decorations of Hyde Park.”42

In short, the battle over Rima was in part a struggle to define the proper boundaries of Rima’s

public. Epstein imagined the right audience for his work to be an international community of art

experts. “It is no good paying any attention to the opinions of the man on the street,” he later wrote.

“A man who knew nothing about surgery would not be allowed to criticise a surgical operation. A

man who knows nothing about sculpture should not criticise sculpture.”43 Here art is the province of

the select and knowledgeable few. But this classic avant-garde vision of an exclusive audience led easily to the conclusion that Rima did not belong in a public space. One letter to the Times proposed

moving the Memorial out of the general public area of Hyde Park and into the specifically art-

friendly space of the Tate Gallery, where it would cease to offend the wider public and yet remain

accessible to art lovers.44 Thus Epstein’s own vision of an audience of experts failed to justify the

place of his work in a public park. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 12

A less exclusive and more democratic conception of the public became clearer as the debate wore on. If the work was recognized as great and important by art experts, why not invite the public to become more educated, to learn to appreciate Epstein’s genius? The Spectator imagined that Rima would help to develop public taste if only viewers would give it a chance. “Our advice to the public, then, is to look at Mr. Epstein’s panel again and again—to look at it from different angles and a greater distance.”45 And The Daily Mail reported an attempt to educate viewers in front of Rima:

‘You do not understand it,’ one man shouted to the crowd. ‘If you would only get a

shilling book—’ ‘Why should we?’ chorused the crowd. ‘If we love beauty why should we pay 1s. each

for something which pretends to teach us to appreciate the ugly?’

‘You would learn to understand,’ said the man.46

Here the vision of a public filled with the potential to learn—to become cultivated and sophisticated about art—is set alongside that public’s vocal resistance. Why should they work to understand the art object, pictured here as an investment of money as well as time? What is so wrong with public taste that patronizing “highbrows” feel it necessary to take on the mission of cultivating the masses? And just what exactly is the value of an art education to a broad public?

The value, according to some, would only become clear over time. The “new art,” they claimed, often shocked initial viewers but came to be loved and admired by later generations. Thus a number of voices pleaded with the press and Parliament to wait for the work to grow on the public.

As one critic put it, “The standard of taste will probably be more expansive and more tolerant and will be more remote from that kind of judgment which never encourages a great thing because it is too terribly afraid to sanction a mistake.”47 The Under-Secretary for the Home Office told outraged

Conservative M.P.s that it was only wise “to suspend judgment until the public had a longer opportunity of forming an opinion.”48 And The Daily Mail art critic concluded that the paper’s own readers would come to see the error of their ways: “The memorial may have failed as an instant popular success,” he wrote, “but it will prove itself under the acid test of time.”49 Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 13

This argument for the “acid test of time” is perhaps the avant-garde’s best defense.

Characterized as a daring art of the future, challenging entrenched norms and styles, the avant-garde claims to defy the aesthetic inclinations of the past and present but to anticipate the taste of future generations. This future-oriented line of reasoning accomplishes some useful compromises, uniting art’s competing constituencies. It brings together the notion of an educable public, capable of learning over time to appreciate the subtleties of the new art, with a daring and authentic avant-garde, bravely testing the boundaries of established conventions. It also favors Epstein’s faith in an expert coterie of artists, whose preferences are too advanced and sophisticated for their time, but whose interpretations usher in the process of broadening the public taste. And this forward-looking vision offers the artist the unlikely combination of a loving public, on the one hand, and the assurance of his own disinterestedness, on the other: since the world will express its approbation only posthumously, the artist is not compromised by the pursuit of fashionable rewards or popularity. Thus the avant- garde comes to fruition in its image of the adoring and enlightened public of generations to come.

In this context, the proper public for public art is neither the nation nor the immediate community for the work: it is the public of the future, as yet only dimly foreshadowed. Of course, this position necessarily leads to some odd conclusions when it comes to policy-making. Those who favor the future must argue that broad public dislike is both necessary and pointless: mass revulsion is necessary if the avant-garde is to show itself as new, uncomfortable, and unsettling; but it is pointless for any member of the public to hold on to this revulsion, since it will shortly be superseded by the tolerant generations of the future. In effect, this camp argues that the public ought to overcome their own dislike in the moment that they experience it, supporting the art that violates their tastes and preferences in order to fall in line with a future that is inevitably about to come to pass. The history of art speeds up to infinity, here, as the present must disappear into the future in the very moment that present tastes are expressed.

But the emphasis on the future also has a rhetorical advantage. The public can conceivably be shamed into an embrace of the avant-garde, embarrassed not to have made sufficient progress, mortified to fall behind the future. According to this view, contemporary audiences should acknowledge the limitations of their own preferences, and imagine a future that will scoff at the Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 14 backwardness of those who reject Epstein and praise those who accept him as progressive and advanced. Many of Rima’s champions played to the potential humiliation of the present by generations to come. “We shall be surprised,” said The Spectator, “if this work is not in future reckoned among the finest examples in British art of direct carving in stone.”50

The dangers of a national humiliation suggests that the debate about public art was not only about the public’s aesthetic preferences: it was also about the ways that the work of art itself represented the public. What would Rima say about the state of the nation? Would it reflect English taste in the world’s eyes? How would the future judge the English public?51 The sculpture might have portrayed Hudson’s Rima, but much more contentiously it offered up an image of contemporary life itself, an image to be displayed to the local community, to the nation, to the world, and to the future. Thus a work of public art that was neither indecent nor violent nor politically partisan nonetheless generated the most heated of controversies because the public felt that Epstein’s Rima revealed and implicated them.

More than five decades after Rima’s unveiling and across the ocean, a remarkably similar controversy played itself out, though by this time the avant-garde was becoming outmoded, and Modernism itself had been superseded by its critical postmodern successors.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists became increasingly skeptical of the Modernist attempt to break from social institutions and from tradition, arguing that it is impossible to create anything that can really be called either autonomous or original. There is no possibility of absolute novelty, according to postmodern artists, because meaning cannot be created out of nothing: it has to be assembled from tools, techniques, and signs that are already in circulation. For example, a visual artist might try to make something entirely new, but she is already working within a cultural category she calls art, and choosing to express herself using paint and canvas, or plastic, or fiberglass: the very materials are already marked with significance, as having connotations of high art, or commodity culture, or cutting- edge industry. There is no escape from the trappings of culture. And there are no heroically creative individuals to generate revolutionary new art, since we ourselves are preceded by the sign-systems of language and the values and meanings of culture, which make us who we are. In short, in a world Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 15 where everything is always already second-hand, where individuals themselves are created out of cultural symbols and systems that are already in circulation, the radical newness promised by

Modernism looks impossible. In order to reject all pretense to originality, postmodern artists have often turned to collage and montage, the juxtaposition of pre-existing images in surprising new relationships, and to appropriation, the incorporation into art of objects not created by the artist. Embracing past styles, readymade objects, the local, and the familiar as signs of a postmodern skepticism, the art world has imagined for itself a less revolutionary role than it did in Epstein’s time.

And yet echoes of the disconcerting avant-garde continue to haunt public quarrels over art. In

1979, the American sculptor Richard Serra was invited to propose a sculpture for Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The funds came from the General Services Administration (GSA), which had—and still has—a policy of commissioning a work of art for new federal buildings, allocating one half of one percent of the costs of construction to a prominent American artist. This Art-in-Architecture program, as it is called, has been responsible for both controversies and successes—including

Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Claes Oldenberg’s Bat Column in Chicago, and George Segal’s Restaurant in Buffalo. For the Federal Building in New York, the GSA asked the

National Endowment for the Arts to set up a panel of art experts to nominate an appropriate sculptor. Presented with an array of proposals, the committee chose Richard Serra, believing that his work was monumental enough “not to be overwhelmed by a city of skyscrapers and such miracles of engineering as the Brooklyn Bridge,” and exciting enough to “capture the energy, enterprise, and fast movement of the city’s inhabitants.”52 Serra was also a groundbreaking contemporary artist whom many saw as “the most important sculptor of his generation.”53

Serra studied the passage of pedestrians through and across the plaza, and he wanted to build a work that would draw attention to the way that people moved through the space. He proposed a long, curving wall made out of Cor-Ten steel to bisect the area. It would stretch to a length of 120 feet and stand 12 feet high. The GSA in New York asked for a detailed study of the impact of Tilted

Arc on the environment, including safety, pedestrian traffic, lighting, drainage, and law enforcement.54 Serra altered his proposal to take their concerns into account, and it was approved in

1980. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 16

Even before the work was complete, complaints began to stream in. Initial petitions demanding Tilted Arc’s removal boasted thirteen hundred signatories, many of them workers in the adjacent federal building. Chief Judge Edward D. Re was particularly vocal about his dislike of the Arc. He circulated petitions and protested vehemently against the “rusted steel barrier” while it was still in the process of construction.55 The furor later died down, only to be whipped up again three years later, perhaps deliberately by Re, who certainly helped to launch the letter-writing campaign to

Washington.56 In the first four years of Tilted Arc’s life, the GSA reported forty-five hundred letters and appeals urging its removal, lamenting the ugliness, the inconvenience, the incomprehensibility, and the intimidating bulk of Serra’s sculpture [fig. 2].

Figure 2: Serra, Tilted Arc (1981)

In March of 1985, the GSA’s New York Regional Administrator, William Diamond,

convened a panel to decide whether or not the Arc should be relocated. He held an open public

hearing which lasted three days. Those who testified included not only local residents and workers,

but art experts, curators, dealers, politicians, arts administrators, sculptors, playwrights, painters, and performance artists. In all, 180 people spoke at the hearing, 122 for preserving Tilted Arc in the

newly renamed Jacob Javits Plaza, 58 for its removal.57

It would not be clear from the testimony in the Tilted Arc hearing that the avant-garde was a

thing of the past. For one thing, Serra’s detractors presented familiar complaints about the work’s Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 17 elitism, its inaccessibility. “This strip of rust,” said one worker, is “an arrogant-nose-thumbing gesture at the government and those who serve the government.”58 According to one commentator on the case, “what became evident during the hearings was a deep and abiding popular resentment for art delivered from above.”59 Meanwhile, the Arc’s defenders consistently praised the work for defying public taste and mass culture. Unsettling the audience was only appropriate, Serra advocates argued, because “truly creative people in the arts make work that is challenging, demanding that we think of our surroundings, our fellow man, and especially ourselves in a new and unaccustomed way.”60 Some argued that if the country did not encourage such challenges, it would be seriously impoverished, left with only “the conventional, the uninspired and the uncontroversial.”61 In good avant-garde fashion, Serra himself claimed the integrity of the autonomous artist, telling the press that he had no intention of pleasing public taste if that meant pandering to a facile consumerist taste for pretty surfaces.62

As in the battle over Rima, the opposing sides had little trouble agreeing that the work was neither conventionally charming nor effortlessly pleasing, and again the real question was whether or not such deliberate departures from prettiness had social value. Many who fought to preserve the Arc agreed that the object was “confrontational,” “bullying,” and “aggressive,” but they made the case that this was a good thing: it was precisely the work’s tense and critical relations to its surroundings that allowed it to function as a meaningful response to a pitiless urban experience. As one art historian put it, “Before art liberates our vision and develops our judgment, it unleashes our prejudices—acts of violent contempt with which we defend the loss and absence of vision of which art so painfully reminds us.”63

But the startling and disruptive character of Serra’s work could not be characterized in the hearings as a hallmark of the “new art,” as it had been in Epstein’s time. By 1985, the public had long been familiar with the conception of art as a challenging shock. Oddly, however, witnesses repeatedly described the disruption of new art as the hallmark of all art. Many of those who testified in Serra’s favor argued that good art always and necessarily provoked such upsetting new reactions that audiences had to grow slowly used to its novelty. Witness after witness cited examples of notable art works from the past that had been initially received with hostility, but had come to be Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 18 beloved by their publics.64 From Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Leonardo’s Last Supper to the

Eiffel Tower and Rodin’s Thinker, Tilted Arc was only the latest in an long tradition of great art that had unsettled its first audiences. This transhistorical claim is not quite accurate. The deliberate shock of the new was itself new in 1925, strictly associated with the “modern” in art and clearly distinguished from an older but still vigorous academic conventionalism. The insistence on rapid innovation in art can be directly linked to the rise of the avant-garde, which means that a firm belief in the importance of challenging art is the particular inheritance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.65

Although Serra’s advocates were mistaken about the universal and transhistorical character of their own definition of art, it is intriguing that they so consistently assumed that the particular shock of the avant-garde defined art as such. After all, if Richard Serra belongs to a postmodern moment that turns away from radical innovation to welcome back tradition, it is surely strange to find that Serra’s work distresses and disconcerts its audience to much the same extent as Epstein’s Rima.

But it is a curious fact that postmodernism, in its eagerness to swallow up and reuse all of the styles and movements of the past, incorporates even the Modernist rupture from the past into its comprehensive embrace. The avant-garde is not so much superseded as integrated into the project of its postmodern heirs. Jürgen Habermas has suggested that with the dawn of postmodernity, the shock of the new has itself become ironically familiar, conventional—banal. But it has also become definitive, central, perhaps even the sine qua non of art. As he puts it, “Modernism is dominant but dead.”66 This view has become something of a commonplace. Los Angeles Times writer William

Wilson commented in 1985 that “artists were still out to provoke the citizenry out of sheer habit.”67

In short, the demise of Modernism has done little to resolve worrying questions about the role of public art because the avant-garde has left us a powerful legacy—a definition of authentic art as that which challenges and defies public taste. It may be nothing more now than a habit—even a bad habit—but it is at the root of continuing quarrels over the value and character of public art.

Thus many of the questions posed by Rima simply continued to vex Tilted Arc, as if nothing had changed. When it came to defining the work’s proper public, Tilted Arc provoked uncanny echoes of the Rima case. Arguing to remove the Arc, William Diamond focused his attention on the Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 19 local community, stating that he had “relied heavily upon the arguments proffered by Manhattan

Community Board #1, a legally constituted body which represents more than 250,000 residents in lower Manhattan.”68 On the other side, witnesses argued for the global impact of Tilted Arc, insisting the art work was international, a destination “for informed and sophisticated visitors.”69 Donald

Thalacker, director of the Art-in-Architecture program, skipped over the local community altogether when he defended Tilted Arc, praising artists for creating “works of public art for the American people, for visitors from other countries, and [for our] future generations.”70 And indeed, the Arc’s advocates lobbied not only for a global audience, but for the public of the future, since “truly challenging works of art require a period of time before their artistic language can be understood by a broader public.”71

Dwight Ink, acting administrator of the GSA in Washington, summarized the arguments for and against the Arc as follows:

Most of the people who testified for relocation placed a high value on the wishes of the

people who live and work in the area. Those favoring retention focused more on longer-term

values of the art work to the public than on the concerns of employees and local residents who are directly affected by the work.72

Ink was right: trapped in a struggle between the local and contemporary tastes of the community using the plaza on the one hand, and the more worldly preferences of both an international art community and an unpredictable future on the other, Tilted Arc was poised, like Rima, between competing conceptions of the public.

And the struggle was heated because, as in the Rima scandal, witnesses took the work personally, repeatedly characterizing the Arc as a representation of the public itself. One local resident mentioned the many visitors who came to the plaza to apply for citizenship at the

Immigration and Naturalization Service. How well would Tilted Arc represent America for them?

“[W]hen they enter the building from which they hope to emerge with hope and promise for a freer and better future for themselves and their families, they cannot help but be reminded by Tilted Arc of Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 20 the iron curtains from which they escape.”73 A supervisor in the Bureau of Investigations who worked in the plaza imagined revolutionary war hero Nathan Hale looking at Tilted Arc and asking,

“‘What did I give up my life for if this is what they descend to in these days?’”74 On the other side, witnesses were equally impassioned. “I am here,” said one, “because of my concern for our own image as a great city, a great country, and a remarkable society dedicated to individual freedoms, including the freedom of expression.”75 “It’s in the starkness of [Tilted Arc],” said another, “that I believe we as citizens ought frequently to be reminded of the difficulties there are in the pursuit of democracy.”76 And to take the Arc down would simply be embarrassing for the city’s reputation as a cultural capital. “New York is beginning to act like a hick town,” said painter Steven Davis. “It’s a big disappointment.”77

As in the Rima debate, too, those who championed the art work had to generate complex arguments for the relationship between disquieting minority visions and weighty majority tastes. Art historian Irving Sandler argued that the only way for a democratic society to “achieve a valid public art” was to allow a variety of artists to express themselves freely.78 In this view, art can only be a

valid expression of democracy if it communicates marginal and unorthodox perspectives to prove the

society’s commitment to tolerance and diversity. Though Serra did not represent a marginalized ethnic minority, sculptor Scott Burton testified that he expressed “the values of… an intellectual sub-

culture.”79 Perhaps most ingenious of all was the argument put forward by composer Peter Gordon,

who made the case that the history of art was like the history of American democracy, which meant

that art policy could not be reversed with every change in public opinion; it required the same

flexibility and foresight as the Constitution: “The founding fathers of our country were well aware of

the quick changes of public mood and taste,” Gordon said. “That is why the government was created

with a built-in checks and balance system and, indeed, why America has survived.”80 The Tilted Arc controversy differed from the Epstein scandal in that voices both for and against the sculpture repeatedly raised questions about how to measure the preferences of its conflicting constituencies. The press, the government, and the testimony in the hearings might all claim to represent the public, but what the was the best way to gauge the truth of public opinion? In his proposal to relocate Tilted Arc, Diamond focused on the 250,000 locals represented by Manhattan Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 21

Community Board #1—which had voted twenty-two to zero to remove the sculpture. He also mentioned the 4500 letters of protest and petitions. The Arc’s advocates countered that the

Community Board had not given its usual prior notice before the meeting, failing to publicize its debate on Tilted Arc, and only 22 of the 47 members were present. They also pointed out that the ratio of witnesses in the public hearing was two to one in favor keeping the sculpture in place and that the letters defending Tilted Arc far outnumbered those against.81

But the number of witnesses was troubling as a gauge of public opinion because the witnesses themselves represented highly variable constituencies: while many who supported Tilted

Arc represented the same or overlapping groups—different pieces of the art world—some of Serra’s opponents spoke for discrete and fairly large populations, like Peter Hirsch, who was “authorized” by the Association of Immigration Attorneys to speak out against the art work. “We feel,” he told the panel, “that a good place to put the Tilted Arc would be in the Hudson River.”82 Similarly, one tenant in the Federal Building claimed to speak for the “thousands upon thousands of people who come to this building each day to work or seek assistance.”83 And this populism was not confined to the Arc’s opponents: one art critic described Serra as a representative of the working class, his background and his use of steel speaking for all working people and a long history of American industry and labor.84 If it was hard to calculate the many constituencies—vocal and silent, present and future, local and global, elitist and populist—there were some who argued that certain voices simply counted more than others. An administrator in the building urged the panel to reject the voices of those who did not work in Federal Plaza: “They don’t have to look at [Tilted Arc], and they don’t have to negotiate around it to walk across the plaza.”85 Compelled to steer around the sculpture every single work day, those who worked in the building should be taken more seriously than occasional visitors, tourists, and distant experts. But on the other side, artists questioned the credentials of non- professionals to judge Serra at all. “If I was a nuclear physicist giving a lecture,” said one witness,

“people who did not know [anything] about nuclear physics would not stand up and contradict me.”86

And “with all due respect,” said sculptor Tony Rosenthal to the panel, “when Mr. Diamond read your qualifications, I didn’t hear anything about knowledge of public art.”87 Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 22

These questions about the difficulty of measuring and weighing the opinions of diverse constituencies are of course familiar to those who deal with public policy. Indeed, the Tilted Arc open public hearing, more organized and constructive than the Rima uproar, represented an attempt to engage the various local communities and the art world in a deliberative process. And a number of

those who testified praised the GSA for welcoming an open dialogue on the issue. But that is not

quite the whole story. As with Rima, the peculiarity of the arts controversy—and what distinguishes art from other political problems since the beginning of the avant-garde—is that official condemnation and outrage are perceived as strengthening the art world’s sense of its own separation

from other social institutions, bolstering the values of artistic isolation, purity, and critical disinterestedness. Thus while politicians and administrators claimed to learn from the Tilted Arc

controversy to invite more community involvement from the outset with public arts projects, the

artist only learned to feel all the more confident of his own integrity—stronger for having been under

attack by official bodies. Serra played up his role as outsider, as subversive critic of the status quo:

“People just don’t want to believe their beloved government would [remove Tilted Arc] because it is no better than the Soviets bulldozing the work of dissident artists.”88 Then, from his position as high- minded outcast, Serra could accuse the government of having been partisan and interested, misunderstanding the autonomy of authentic art. “The governmental decree to remove and therefore destroy Tilted Arc is the direct outcome of a cynical Republican cultural policy that supports art only as a commodity.”89 Contrasting the purity of art to the polluted world of consumerism and power politics, what the artist learned from the controversy was that there was every reason to continue to flout public taste and governmental and legal approval in the interests of the disinterestedness of art.

So far, Richard Serra has seemed like a paradigmatic example of the Modernist avant-garde.

Embattled, unpopular, challenging, and difficult, Tilted Arc had everything in common with Epstein’s Rima. But Serra explicitly claimed that his own work was postmodern rather than modern.

Tilted Arc belonged to a sculptural movement that Serra had helped to found—site-specificity—and it was this movement that defined Tilted Arc as specifically postmodern. “Unlike modernist works that give the illusion of being autonomous from their surroundings, and which function critically only in relation to the language of their own medium, site-specific works emphasize the comparison Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 23 between two separate languages and can therefore use the language of one to criticize the language of the other.”90 In other words, if most Modernist works of art turn inward to explore their own media, focusing on paint or stone or metal to the exclusion of the world, site-specific works enter into a dialogue with the world around them, engaging in a kind of dynamic conversation with a specific local environment. In the case of Tilted Arc, this dialogue was intended to involve not only the buildings and design of the plaza but also the movement of pedestrians through the existing space:

“My sculptures,” Serra told the panel, “are not meant for a viewer to stop, look, and stare at. The historical concept of placing a sculpture on a pedestal was to establish a separation between the sculpture and the viewer. I am interested in a behavioral space in which the viewer interacts with the sculpture in its context.”91 Thus the sculpture was intended to draw attention not only to itself, but to the viewer in the surroundings. This is a postmodern move in the sense that the art work seeks connection to the social world; it takes seriously the local setting and the community, and strives to generate a new reaction to the space by interacting with what came before.92 In this light, site- specificity would seem to lend itself perfectly to public arts projects. Sensitive to local patterns, places, and symbols, the site-specific work of art is one that strives for a vibrant relationship with its immediate public. But inviting a lively dialogue is not the same as approving the status quo. As Richard Serra

explained: “there are sites where it is obvious that an art work is being subordinated to/

accommodated to/ adapted to/ subservient to/ useful to…. In such cases it is necessary to work in

opposition to the constraints of the context, so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of

questionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.”93

Attempting a careful compromise between engaged dialogue and principled autonomy, Serra described his work as critically responsive to its surroundings and its patrons. Tilted Arc spoke to its environment but not by affirming either Federal Plaza or the politicians then in power. Art spoke to its context, in other words, by criticizing it.

In the hearings, site-specificity became a complex theme. Serra’s champions praised the work for its complex engagement with the space around it, and especially for exposing the existing space as a failure. As one witness explained: “This appropriately scaled wall of hot, curved steel [looks] Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 24 like an incredibly polite and human critique of a stiff and inelegant and pretentious architecture.”94

Another argued that “The sculpture’s scale and moving form transforms what is essentially a desolate, open space without any distinguishing characteristics into an exciting perceptual encounter.”95 In this view, what the public should really be complaining about was not the sculpture but the buildings and space around it: the surroundings “are inhuman in their scale, boring and tedious, and the sculpture makes you confront that issue every time you walk by it.”96

In this context, Serra’s postmodern critique of Federal Plaza raises significant new questions about the role of art in public places. Site-specific work does not simply sit in a location as a thing in itself, to be praised or condemned on its own terms; it intentionally disrupts, reshapes, and reinterprets the space. In doing so it deliberately calls into question the form and character of an existing public space. And this is no small gesture. After all, the public spaces we inherit—from parks and plazas to buildings, streets, and highways—organize our movements and structure our experience. Since these spaces are mostly there for their use-value, since they accumulate piecemeal, and since the map changes slowly over time, there are few opportunities to question the extent to which the overall design of public space controls and orders daily life. But surely public space is as important to critique as the art commissioned for it? In the hearings on Tilted Arc, more than one witness suggested destroying not the art work but the building and plaza that had been confronted and exposed by the art work:

This federal office building has got to be one of the ugliest buildings in the lower Manhattan

skyline—a clear insult to and a distraction from such elegant neighbors as the Federal

Courthouse, the Municipal Building, the Woolworth Building, and police headquarters. I

don’t suggest this merely in jest.… If by your actions you indicate that there is a legitimate process available for the public to initiate the removal of a work of public art, then why

shouldn’t the same process be available for the removal of a public building?…. Maybe you

are really onto something. Think of all the problems this new idea could solve: how about all

the dull, useless plazas, including this one, that allow developers to build ugly buildings

bigger?97 Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 25

Should we be focusing our political attention on the massive scale and hideous style of existing skyscrapers rather than attacking the lone work of art that challenges their existence? Keith Haring thought so: “If … people were really concerned about altering the beauty of the urban environment, they would be trying to stop the [construction] of huge, ugly office buildings which change the entire neighborhood.”98

But there was another side to the story. Those who wanted to remove Serra’s Arc repeatedly praised the existing space and attacked the sculpture for transforming it. One worker explained that it was precisely the unremarkable nature of the plaza that had given it is value: “Until 1980 I regarded it as a relaxing reflective space, where I could walk, sit and contemplate in an unhurried manner.”99

Representative Theodore Weiss agreed: “Tilted Arc rends the serenity of the plaza.”100 Before the

Arc, Federal Plaza was notable for its tranquility, and its absence of excitement and stimulation were helpfully soothing in the busy city.

Interestingly enough, there was little disagreement on this point. One witness who spoke out against the Arc testified that it “violate[d] the very spirit and concept of the plaza,”101 but this comment could have come just as easily from his advocates. All concurred that Serra’s site-specific work deliberately interrupted and challenged the original plaza. The only question was which design was more damaging to the neighborhood: the spirit and concept of the original space or the space as it had been reconceived by Richard Serra.

Of course, if this was a dialogue between two designs, Serra was not the only designer. An architect, Robert Allen Jacobs, had carefully planned the plaza, shaping the site to suit its community and surroundings. As his wife told the panel: “The plaza is a site-specific work of art incorporating a geometric paving design, now disrupted…. Mr. Serra’s work, according to him, was deliberately designed to change, alter, and dislocate someone else’s artistic creation. This is wrong.”102

Did the architectural work of Robert Allen Jacobs deserve the same protection and respect

and offer the same public value as Richard Serra’s Arc? The two sides in the debate clearly thought not, since Serra’s supporters regularly proposed to destroy the site and his opponents just as Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 26 consistently defended it. No one argued that all designs were equally sacrosanct. But what exactly was the difference between the two works?

Site-specific sculpture is not exactly the same as architecture, and although the distinction between the two art forms is not absolute, it may be helpful to point to an important difference.

Architecture is the shaping of space for use; it is defined as functional, utilitarian. Thus it can be evaluated according to how well it performs its tasks. Does the building house sufficient numbers of workers? Is it structurally sound? Does the space allow for the smooth movement of workers and visitors? Art, by contrast, serves no immediate practical purpose: in fact, for customs purposes the

United States Government defines art as distinct from “articles of utility.”103 Art is therefore evaluated by strictly non-utilitarian criteria: its creative energy, its sensuous appeal, its potential to disrupt established norms and habits. In this sense, art seems far more expendable than architecture: surely we can do without sculpture but would struggle to function and survive if all buildings, squares, and streets disappeared?

Witnesses who wanted to remove Tilted Arc frequently bemoaned the uselessness of the sculpture, pointing to the fact it thwarted more constructive activities and services. “Utilization of the plaza is now severely limited, preventing use by the occupants, and the neighboring community, for ceremonies, cultural attractions, and other recreational activities.”104 With the Arc out of the way, a whole range of cultural activities other than monumental visual art would come to the plaza. “We will be able to bring cultural shows here. We will have bandstands, and we will have performances.

We will have food here sold to people. We will have greenery, landscaping.”105 Art is not only useless itself: it precludes other meanings, other expressions, and other functions. Art, we might say, gets in the way.

But that is precisely the point. Richard Serra and his defenders claim that his site-specific art is deliberately distinct from social use. It provides a critical dialogue with other more utilitarian uses of space around it. It hints at a liberation from the pressure of ordinary duties and obligations. It

“stands outside of the homogenization of bureaucracy.”106 It imagines a neutral sphere separate from commerce, politics, and labor. And it offers a non-utilitarian perspective capable of challenging the uses to which human beings and their spaces are habitually put. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 27

If this sounds remarkably like the voice of the avant-garde, it is. Works of postmodern public art, like Serra’s Tilted Arc, may assert that they have left the principled isolation of Modernism behind, but under attack they still claim the autonomy and integrity of their avant-garde precursors as a defense, justifying their intentional disruptions of contemporary life. Under attack, art’s supporters define works which cater to popular taste as entertainment rather than art—as Disneyland107—and celebrate the distance between art and current fashion. Under attack, artists condemn the Government as both incompetent to judge art and unwilling to preserve and support artistic expression. In short, contemporary art is still perfectly capable of exulting in its defiance of public taste.

In Richard Serra’s case, the avant-garde failed to persuade the public of its value, and the results were catastrophic for Tilted Arc. The GSA, persuaded that the work should be relocated to a more art-friendly space, voted to remove it from Jacob Javits Plaza and to place it in a museum. But

Serra made it clear to the art world that to move the Arc would be to destroy it: he argued that it was the dialogue with its surroundings made the site-specific Tilted Arc what it was, and to shift it to another space would be to violate the integrity of the art. Thus no museum offered to take the work from its site, and in March of 1989, Tilted Arc was dismantled. It now sits in storage, waiting for the public of the future to recognize its greatness and return it to its proper place.

Figure 3: Dismantling Tilted Arc (1989) Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 28

As for Epstein’s Rima, the public simply lost interest in it after World War II, and now it sits in a quiet corner of Hyde Park, largely unnoticed by passers-by. Today it is neither the distinguished example of British sculpture envisioned by the Spectator nor the shameful disgrace imagined by the Royal Academy. It shocks no one, and at the same time it impresses few with its spatial rhythms and wild emotion. Essentially unknown to Londoners, tourists, and art historians alike, Rima has been judged by the nation, the world, and the public of the future as entirely unobjectionable and perhaps just a little bit ordinary.108

Rima and Tilted Arc sparked surprisingly similar quarrels. One is now forgotten and the other destroyed, but the unresolved issues they raised at the two ends of the twentieth century may well haunt us well into the twenty-first. The avant-garde is no longer be the force that it was, but it is still at work in contemporary debates about the arts. So—what can we learn from the scandals of the past in order to tackle and resolve the conflicts of the future?

Both controversies reveal that art and politics in the twentieth century repeatedly collided over the problem of representation. Avant-garde art not only refuses conventional artistic representation, or realism: it also appears to repudiate all aspirations to democratic political representation. Relentlessly striving for disinterested autonomy, modernist art intentionally rejects the majority in favor of the periphery, whether that be the oppressed margins or the select few, or, as in the Epstein case, both—since he was both a subjugated Jewish outsider and an aesthetic elitist.

The avant-garde flourishes precisely because of its deliberate minority status: flouting national traditions and contemporary tastes, celebrating its status as outsider and innovator, boasting of its cosmopolitan, transnational sophistication, and imagining itself projected out of a hostile present into a welcoming future, the avant-garde rejoices in its rejection of the contemporary majority. On the other hand, however, public art always makes some claim to represent the community or the nation, producing an image of the public that is then broadcast to the world and future generations. The work of art not only sits in a public space and gathers its support from public funds: it comes to stand for the public. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 29

Can avant-garde public art possibly accomplish both of its missions—simultaneously celebrating the margins and representing the mainstream, at once flouting the majority and conveying it to the world? The answer, I think, is a hesitant yes. It is possible to make the case that the startled voices of the present cannot be taken as a good representation of the public, since their initial shock may simply register the emergence of something new and profound. Only the public of the future can therefore properly judge the new art. It is also possible to launch a democratic argument for the expression of beleaguered minority voices as representative of a tolerant, broadminded majority. In this view, the less pleasing the art, the more generous the public appears. And finally, it is possible to argue that the public benefits from the challenge of the new, enriched by a confrontation with its own unease.

But how might a public be persuaded to welcome the uncomfortable dissonance of the avant- garde? First of all, I think, it is important to acknowledge that although the avant-garde seems deliberately changeable and arbitrary, popular taste is not simply established as a permanent fact either. Mass culture has changed quickly in the past hundred years, and it has been shaped and reshaped by cultural, social, economic, and political influences. Indeed, the twentieth century taught us that there is nothing intrinsically popular or intrinsically elitist about any particular style; low and high culture often influence each other, sometimes coming to switch places altogether. Television advertising, for example, now routinely uses montage effects that came originally from avant-garde film. Conversely, experimental filmmakers in the French “New Wave” looked to popular Hollywood movies for inspiration. Thus no single technique is inescapably marked as either high or low. In fact, according to Bourdieu, popular and avant-garde culture constantly redefine themselves against each other, jockeying for their respective positions in the same large cultural force-field.

As we have seen, what the art world proudly claims is the periphery of this cultural field, rejecting the mainstream as crucial to its minority identity. But what is the value to the rest of us of this artistic marginality? Artists have rejected popular culture in part because they see it as damaging to the collective, driven by profit motives and therefore fundamentally undemocratic. Increasingly monolithic, popular taste is more and more concentrated in the hands of a few corporations—today we might name Disney, Time-Warner, AOL, Rupert Murdoch, MTV. Thus the preferences of a tiny Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 30 handful of organizations mold the tastes of millions of people: they become the most familiar and comfortable expressions of culture and increasingly homogenize global taste, driving out dissenting or unprofitable voices. Mainstream culture therefore comes to us in the guise of fewer and fewer alternatives, fewer and fewer images, ideas, visions, and possibilities. In rebelling against the threat of a terrifying uniformity, avant-garde artists would say that they offer us a glimpse of something else, something distinctive, something utopian, something other. Governments should fund what people dislike, then, precisely because our preferences are not good indications of our welfare. After a century overwhelmed by advertising, propaganda, and massive media mergers, it is difficult to take shifting public likes and dislikes as original, true, profound expressions of ourselves. Majority preferences are rather manifestations of a historical moment when our inclinations are produced and manipulated by a small assortment of cultural images that deaden, neutralize, and standardize the vast array of possibilities that we might otherwise envision, conceptualize, and choose. In this context, the public might come to value a discomfort that would prompt a liberating and critical rethinking of deceptive preferences and prejudices—finding, in the end, that we like our own dislike. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 31

Notes

1 Punch (3 June 1925), 595. 2 L. R. W. Nevinson, quoted in The Daily News (21 May 1925), 8. Several years earlier, John Middleton Murray had written: “There is much, and there is room for much, controversy as to who is our best painter; but there is none on the question who is our best sculptor. News editors, newspaper readers, cognoscenti—all, apparently, save that strange and unknown company which hands out commissions for our public monuments—are in agreement that Epstein is—the real thing.” The Nation (14 February 1920); excerpted in Jacob Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture: An Autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1940), 287. 3 From a letter from Muirhead Bone, artist and head of the Hudson Memorial Committee, to Sir Lionel Earle, head of the Office of Works, 19 June 1923. Reprinted in Terry Friedman, The Hyde Park Atrocity: Creation and Controversy (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre, 1988), 149. 4 From a letter from Mrs Frank Lemon to Jacob Epstein, 15 February 1923. In Friedman, The Hyde Park Atrocity, 148. 5 Memorandum sent by Muirhead Bone to the Rt. Hon. Viscount Peel, First Commissioner of Works, 29 November 1925. In Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture, 294. 6 Friedman, The Hyde Park Atrocity, 9. 7 Friedman, The Hyde Park Atrocity, 10. 8 Quoted in Friedman, The Hyde Park Atrocity, 32. 9 These were the gloomy words of Frank Dicksee, the President of the Royal Academy, six months after Rima had appeared in Hyde Park. “Another Attack on ‘Rima.’ Artists Appeal for the Removal of Epstein’s Monument,” Evening Standard (18 November 1925), 4. 10 Letter from George Hubbard, Daily Mail (21 May 1921), 9. 11 Letter from R. W. Bennett, Daily Mail (25 May 1925), 10. 12 “The Hyde Park Atrocity,” Daily Mail (22 May 1925), 8. 13 “Another Attack on ‘Rima.’ Artists Appeal for the Removal of Epstein’s Monument,” Evening Standard (18 November 1925), 4. 14 A prominent actor told the press: “I dislike the modern worship of ugliness, and if it comes to a question of ugly- ugly and pretty-pretty, I prefer the pretty-pretty.” “Another Attack on ‘Rima,’” Evening Standard (18 November 1925), 4. The Daily Mail complained that “It is unfortunate that so many of our ‘highbrows’ seem to imagine that art is only good when it is ugly.” “The Hyde Park Atrocity,” Dail Mail (22 May 1925), 8. And one irate Londoner wrote to The Times to say: “we wanted something to appeal to the man, the woman, the child ‘in the street,’ and if it had been achieved we would have cared little if it had been ‘pretty-pretty’ to the art critic.” Letter from George Arbuthnot, The Times (26 May 1925), 17. 15 “The Hyde Park Atrocity: Mr. Epstein’s Panel. Public Demand for its Removal.” Daily Mail (23 May 1925), 10. 16 “Bird Sanctuary Panel,” Daily News (21 May 1925), 8. 17 The petition read: “[Rima is] by universal consent so inappropriate and even repellent in character that the most fitting course open to the authorities for so woeful a lapse of judgment would be to remove it bodily from its present position with as little delay as possible.” Quoted in Stephen Gardiner, Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), 256. 18 Rima had gathered support, the second petition claimed, from “nearly all the greatest artists.” “A Counter-Blast for ‘Rima.’ Support ‘From Nearly All the Greatest Artists.’ Evening Standard (19 November 1925), 4. Epstein told The Daily News that Dicksee’s view was not even representative of the whole Royal Academy. “Epstein and Dicksee,” Daily News (19 November 1925), 5. 19 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 21. Though ostensibly dedicated to describing the autonomy of literature as a field, Bourdieu’s book claims that the history of the visual arts runs parallel to the development of the literary field. 20 This push toward innovation is an inevitable consequence of the desire to establish autonomy, according to Bourdieu. He writes: “An enterprise moves closer to the ‘commercial’ pole the more directly or completely the products it offers on the market respond to a pre-existing demand and in pre-established forms.” Ibid., 142. 21 In a particularly beautiful irony, Bourdieu argues that this ongoing stake in detachment lent artists, writers, and critics a particular powerful authority when it came to politics. Emile Zola’s forceful voice in the Dreyfus Affair in Paris is Bourdieu’s best example. Bourdieu is not the only writer to draw attention to this kind of conclusion. In a Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 32

posthumous book on aesthetics, Theodor Adorno insisted that art “is social primarily because it stands opposed to society. Now this opposition art can mount only when it has become autonomous. By congealing into an entity unto itself—rather than obeying existing social norms and thus proving itself to be socially useful—art criticizes society just by being there.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, C. Lenhardt, trans. (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 321. Following Adorno, Peter Bürger writes: “the (relative) freedom of art vis-à-vis the praxis of life is… the condition that must be fulfilled if there is to be a critical cognition of reality. An art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it, along with the distance.” See his Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50. Bürger’s assessment of the autonomy of art differs significantly from Bourdieu’s conception of a “force-field” of art. Bürger describes the avant-garde as launching an attack on the “institution” of art, but he does not then acknowledge that such an attack is actually integral to the institutionalization of the art world, as Bourdieu does. Bürger sees the institutionalization of the avant-garde as a mark of its failure: “Since now the protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is now accepted as art, the gesture of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic” (53). 22 “Another Attack on ‘Rima,’” Evening Standard (18 November 1925), 4. 23 “Another Attack on ‘Rima,’” Evening Standard (18 November 1925), 4. 24 Letter from Sybil Thorndike, The Times (25 May 1925), 15. 25 “Mr Epstein and Hyde Park,” The Spectator (30 May 1925), 880. 26 The Nation (28 November 1925), quoted in Gardiner, Jacob Epstein, 257. 27 “Bird Sanctuary Panel,” Daily News (21 May 1925), 8. 28As the sculptor Henry Moore put it, Epstein was the first and loneliest English sculptor to produce such a shock: “he took the brick-bats, he took the insults, he faced the howls of derision.” Terry Friedman, “Epsteinism,” in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings, eds. Evelyn Silber and Terry Friedman (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre, 1989), 35. 29 “The Hyde Park Atrocity: Mr. Epstein’s Panel. Public Demand for its Removal.” Daily Mail (23 May 1925), 9. 30 The Evening News (26 November 1925), quoted in Terry Friedman, “Epsteinism,” in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings, eds. Evelyn Silber and Terry Friedman (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre, 1989), 41. 31 “The Hyde Park Atrocity,” Daily Mail (22 May 1925), 8. 32 For example, take Richard Grenier’s comments in The Washington Times (28 June 1989): “the artistic community has its own eleventh commandment.: Thou shalt grant federal funds to art that’s too intellectual for you to understand, you rube.” Then he continues: “[If I were an artist] I could get official support for art demeaning almost any of this country’s institutions: sexual, political or religious. But could I demean gays? Women? Minorities?” Excerpted in Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. Richard Bolton (New York: New Press, 1992), 45. 33 See Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, New Press, 2000). 34 Thus Bourdieu writes that Baudelaire’s attitude in the political upheavals of 1848 is exemplary of the emerging avant-garde: “he does not fight for the republic, but for the revolution, one he loves as a sort of art for the sake of revolt and transgression.” Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 77. 35 The Hidden Hand, or The Jewish Peril (February 1924), 22-23; quoted in Stephen Gardiner, Jacob Epstein, 245. 36 Evelyn Silber and Terry Friedman, “Epstein in the Public Eye, 1917-30,” 221. 37 The Saturday Review (November 1928), quoted in Stephen Gardiner, Jacob Epstein, 258. Here socialism is a kind of outsider politics, and so it makes sense for Rima to represent the Left in this historical moment. Striking a lighter note, the perceived alliance of Judaism with an unintelligible Modernism provoked the following anonymous limerick, which linked Epstein with Albert Einstein and the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein: I don’t like the family Stein. There is Gert, there is Ep, there is Ein. Gert’s writings are punk. Ep’s statues are junk, Nor can anyone understand Ein. Anonymous, around 1929. Quoted in “Epstein Lampooned,” in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings, eds. Evelyn Silber and Terry Friedman (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre, 1989), 73. 38 Letter from Captain A. L. Kennedy, The Times (23 May 1925), 12. 39 Letter to The Morning Post (24 November 1925), quoted in Stephen Gardiner, Jacob Epstein, 258. 40 Quoted in Elizabeth Baker, “The Primitive Within: The Question of Race in Epstein’s Career,” in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings, eds. Evelyn Silber and Terry Friedman (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre, 1989), 44. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 33

41 Letter from Henry Simpson of the Authors’ Club to The Times (28 May 1925), 10. 42 “A Londoner’s Diary,” Evening Standard (23 November 1925), 6. 43 Jacob Epstein, The Sculptor Speaks, ed. Arnold L. Haskell (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 3. 44 Letter from A. H. Henderson-Livesey, The Times (28 May 1925), 10. 45 “Mr Epstein and Hyde Park,” The Spectator (30 May 1925), 880-81. 46 “The Hyde Park Atrocity: Take It Away!” The Daily Mail (25 May 1925), 9-10. 47 “Mr Epstein and Hyde Park,” The Spectator (30 May 1925), 880. 48 “The Epstein Panel. Minister on Suspending Judgment,” Daily Mail (28 May 1925), 4. 49 “The Hyde Park Atrocity: Mr. Epstein’s Panel. Public Demand for its Removal.” Daily Mail (23 May 1925), 10. 50 “Mr Epstein and Hyde Park,” The Spectator (30 May 1925), 880-81. 51 After Rima had been defaced by vandals, one Epstein advocate told the Evening Standard that he hoped “no effort would be made to remove the paint or to clean the Hudson memorial, in order that the act may be fixed on the perpetrators of it throughout this generation.” R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, chair of the Hudson Memorial Committee, quoted in “Removing Rima’s Green Paint,” The Evening Standard (13 November 1925), 4. 52 These are the words of Suzanne Delahanty, member of the NEA panel that had nominated Serra. Delahanty also mentioned that the committee sought an artist “talented enough and courageous enough to transform the entire site,” since the building and its plaza were “not distinguished.” And they wanted a work that would express “the dignity and democratic principles upon which our judicial system is founded.” These coments come from her testimony in the hearings about Tilted Arc. See The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, eds. Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 83. 53 Art critic Douglas Crimp, The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 221. 54 Later Serra’s critics would complain about the sculpture as a shield for drug-dealers and terrorists, but the official body responsible for commissioning the sculpture was satisfied that it would cause no harm. 55 Letter of August 18, 1981, from Chief Judge Re to Gerald P. Carmen, administrator of the GSA in Washington, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 26. 56 Serra alleges that Re was the ringleader of this campaign. Serra, “Introduction,” The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 5. Re himself does not claim to have solicited letters of protest, though he did enclose a number of letters demanding the removal of the sculpture with his own letter of November 5, 1984 to Ray Kline, acting administrator of the GSA. See The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 27-28. 57 Testimony from these hearings is collected in two recent volumes, The Destruction of Tilted Arc, already cited, and Public Art, Public Controversy: Tilted Arc on Trial (New York: American Council for the Arts, 1987). Neither text offers a complete transcript of the hearings; both make representative selections. The testimony overlaps to a significant degree, but both are necessary to grasp a full sense of the arguments. 58 Shirley Paris, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 126. 59 Dale McConathy, “Serra’s Unofficial Monument,” in Public Art, Public Controversy, 5. 60 Victor Ganz, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 112. 61 Harriet Dorsen, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 87. 62 Quoted from an interview with William Wilson, “Richard Serra’s ‘Arc’ de Trauma,” The Los Angeles Times (1985); reprinted in Public Art, Public Controversy, 160-61. 63 Benjamin Buchloh, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 92. 64 Not least of those testifying was Joan Mondale, wife of the former Vice President, who claimed that “Art is often misunderstood by those people who see it for the first time. No one can know whether it will speak to another generation or not. We should wait to determine its eloquence and its eternity.” Public Art, Public Controversy, 127. 65 For example, while it is true that Michelangelo fought with his powerful patrons, his struggle had more to do with political and religious conflicts than with the strictly aesthetic desire to break new ground. And as Jürgen Habermas explains in “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” the idea of the “modern” has been shifting since the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the “modern” took on its current sense in art, meaning “‘the new’ which will be overcome and made obsolete through the novelty of the next style.” In The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 4. 66 Habermas, “Modernity,” 6. 67 William Wilson, “Richard Serra’s ‘Arc’ de Trauma,” The Los Angeles Times (1985); reprinted in Public Art, Public Controversy, 161. 68 Letter from William Diamond to Dwight Ink (1 May 1985), in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 144. 69 Elyse Grinstein, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 67. 70 Donald W. Thalacker, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 120. Public Art, Public Outcry—Levine 34

71 William Rubin, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 100-1. 72 Dwight Ink, “Decision on Tilted Arc,” in Public Art, Public Controversy, 164. 73 Shirley Paris, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 126. 74 Harry Watson, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 120. 75 Halina Rosenthal, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 117-18. 76 Gil Winters, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 68. 77 Steven Davis, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 102. 78 Irving Sandler, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 82-83. 79 Scott Burton, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 129. 80 Peter Gordon, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 92. 81 Serra advocates even cast doubt on the small number of detractors at the hearing: “Of the ten thousand employees in the subject building, approximately fifty-five people spoke in favor if its relocation. This modest number is significant because the employees were already at the site of the hearings and could easily take time off to testify.” Of the 115 who spoke out to keep the sculpture, by contrast, many had to travel some distance to make their case. Memo from Donald Thalacker to Dwight Ink (9 May 1985), The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 152-53. 82 Hirsch qualified this statement as his “own personal opinion,” but at the same time he claimed to be speaking for his group. Hirsch, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 123. 83 Norman Steinlauf, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 111. 84 Annette Michelson, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 95. 85 William Toby, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 119. 86 John Weber, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 77. 87 Tony Rosenthal, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 139. 88 Quoted in William Wilson, “Richard Serra’s ‘Arc’ de Trauma,” in Public Art, Public Controversy, 160. 89 Richard Serra, “Introduction,” in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 5. 90 Ibid., 12. 91 Richard Serra, testimony, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 65. 92 As Richard Serra put it in his testimony, “When a known space changes through the inclusion of a site-specific sculpture, one is called upon to relate to the space differently.” See The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 66. 93 Richard Serra, “Introduction,” in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 12-13. 94 Steven Davis, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 102. 95 Joyce Schwartz, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 63. 96 Ronald Feldman, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 75. Some witnesses even suggested that perhaps the controversy itself had come about precisely because Tilted Arc had taught viewers to question their environment. 97 Roberta Brandes Grantz, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 70-71. 98 Keith Haring, in Public Art, Public Controversy, 103. 99 Joseph I. Liebman, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 113. 100 Theodore Weiss, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 115. 101 William Toby, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 119. 102 Margo Jacobs, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 124-25. 103 Margit Rowell, Brancusi v. United States: The Historic Trial, 1928 (Paris, Adam Biro, 1999), 112-13. 104 Norman Steinlauf, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 112. 105 Interview with William Diamond (15 March 1989), in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 271. 106 Joel Kovel, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 94. 107 Serra’s wife asked the panel if they wanted “to turn America into one big Disneyland?” Clara Weyergraf-Serra, in The Destruction of Tilted Arc, 89. 108 The current Royal Parks website, for example, notes that “It is difficult to understand why this bird-bath, in commemoration of the writer and naturalist Hudson, received such criticism in 1925.” See .