Tilted Arc by Richard Serra and & The Thinker by Rodin: A Comparison and Contrast

Tilted Arc by Richard Serra and & The Thinker by Rodin: A Comparison and Contrast

Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" is a rusted slope of curved steel, 12 feet high and 112 feet long. It sticks up out of Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan like a sullen blade, and its presence there has divided the art world into philistines like myself who think it should be removed, and esthetes, who want it to remain forever (Butler, 2000). The controversy is not over taste, since many philistines myself included, admire it as sculpture, but over the relevance of the hostility it has aroused on the part of office workers, whose use of the plaza it severely curtails.

Esthetes insist that it does not impede but in fact metaphorically represents the human flow to and from the banal edifice it mercifully occludes. Philistines insist that artistic merit notwithstanding, the piece is in arrogant disregard of those most directly affected by its presence; to them it is an obstacle and an eyesore. Serra says that the workers "can learn something about a sculptural orientation to space and place." Philistines agree, but ask whether lessons in art appreciation ought to preempt other uses to which space and place might be put. Philistines have no illusions that the plaza will be restored to beauty now that, like Excalibur, the blade is to be removed. But they feel the issues involved to be only marginally esthetic. It is the great if unsought achievement of "Tilted Arc" to have made vivid the truth that something may succeed as a work of art but fail as a work of public art.

Up to now it has been assumed that the criteria for good public art are simply the criteria for good art. All a government agency charged with commissioning public art must do is commission good art for public spaces. "Tilted Arc" meets, and perhaps surpasses, current standards for good sculpture, and since its formal environment, it does all one could ask according to what have seemed the only relevant indexes. The furor that has resulted from its placement suggests (Butler, 2000), however, that we must build something more into our conception of good public art. What we urgently need is a criterion for public art that justifies a work's removal if it does not meet it. It is ...