Michelle Kamhi
  • Home
  • About MMK
    • Biography
    • Key Publications by MMK
    • Media/News
  • Who Says That’s Art?
    • About the Book
    • Contents
    • Introductory Chapter
    • Images of Works Cited
    • Review Excerpts
    • What Readers Say
    • Artworld Myths Debunked
    • Honors
    • Supporters
    • Where to Buy Who Says That’s Art?
  • Bucking the Artworld
    • About the Book
    • Preface
    • Images of Works Cited
    • Reviews
    • Publicity
  • Blog
  • Other Work
    • On Art Education
    • What Art Is
    • Aristos
  • Contact
  • Search

Subscribe to Blog

“Public Art” for Whom?

May 5, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Public Art / 5 Comments

Print This Post Print This Post

The recent installation of a newly commissioned work entitled Masks (Pentagon) by Thomas Houseago in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza highlights the latest of a long list of bizarre projects spearheaded by the Public Art Fund.

Houseago - Mask (Pentagon)

Thomas Houseago, Masks (Pentagon) – Rockefeller Center

Like numerous other projects organized by the Fund and supported by prominent public officials and business leaders in recent years, it promotes the “anything goes” agenda of the contemporary art world far more than it serves the public.

The Public Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that receives support from individuals, corporations, and foundations for temporary exhibitions of “contemporary art” in New York City. Its stated aim is to “redefine public art in relation to the changing nature of contemporary art” (emphasis mine).

Redefining art is, in fact, what the art establishment has long been bent on doing. The public, however, has not been buying the redefinition.

It is too soon to tell what the response of most ordinary people to the Houseago project will be. However, only yesterday (a beautiful spring day), very few of the many pedestrians I observed around the Plaza seemed even to be looking at the piece.

I asked three of them how they liked it. “Not very much,” answered one, with a decided frown of disapproval. A second woman, who was struggling to get a picture of it with her cell phone, replied in some frustration: “I don’t know what it is.” Just one of the three answered that she found it “very interesting.”[*]

Also indicative is the public response to last year’s Rockefeller Plaza installation of Split-Rocker—a floral construction by art world megastar Jeff Koons. As judged from remarks following articles online [more], it ranged from confusion and boredom to a frank indictment as “crap.”

Nor did the public respond with enthusiasm to an earlier, more expansive and expensive Public Art Fund project—Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls. Costing millions to construct (and resulting in substantial damage owing to the saline spray it produced), that project consisted of artificial waterfalls in four waterfront locations, one of them under the Brooklyn Bridge. The Fund’s “most ambitious project” to date, it was actively promoted by Mayor Bloomberg.

As indicated by countless comments following a post on a New York Times blog, however, the response of ordinary people to the Waterfalls project was overwhelmingly negative, often questioning its status as “art.” A typically irreverent remark was: “Looks like the Brooklyn Bridge taking a leak if you ask me . . . an expensive leak.” One person aptly quipped: “This is not art, it is plumbing!”

Houseago - Masks (Pentagon) - 2Houseago’s project—a quasi sculptural installation of five giant mask-like structures—is at least not plumbing. But it intrudes upon one of New York’s most urbane public spaces. And its status as art is equally questionable.

Flouting the traditional view of art as something made with great skill and care, for example, the piece entailed such creative processes on Houseago’s part as his incorporating the footprints left by his young daughter’s dancing on damp clay and his “hurling lumps of clay down from a ladder.” Not quite the techniques employed by the likes of Michelangelo or Donatello. The work also involves the interactive gimmickry of enabling visitors to view their surroundings through openings in the masks. Such spurious approaches to art-making are standard fare in today’s art world, which embraces virtually anything—except traditional painting and sculpture, that is.

What has been the point of the Rockefeller Plaza exhibitions? According to Jerry Speyer—chairman of Tishman Speyer (the owner of Rockefeller Center), which has co-organized them—”It’s been an interesting way of educating the public.”

Educating the public about what? one might ask. The likely answer would be: about the establishment’s view of what constitutes “contemporary art.” That view was succinctly expressed a couple of years ago by Glenn Lowry—the director of the Museum of Modern Art, of which Speyer also happens to be chairman.

When I asked Lowry whether what some “contemporary artists” are creating might no longer be “art,” he replied that, thanks to Marcel Duchamp (the putative creator of Fountain—a urinal that was purportedly transformed into “art” by his signing it with an assumed name), we can no longer ask that question.

“If an artist does it, it’s art,” Lowry declared with finality. That dictum has long been the mantra of the art establishment—with little thought being given to what qualifies someone as an “artist.”

Such an attitude does not “redefine” art. It undefines it. Ordinary people seem to get that.

Perhaps the time has come for the public to educate the Public Art Fund—as well as its all-too-willing cadre of public officials and business leaders (not to mention art experts such as Lowry)—who have for too long been imposing their distorted view of “contemporary art” on the rest of us.


*In The Use and Abuse of Art, cultural historian Jacques Barzun aptly criticized “the Interesting as an esthetic category,” observing that it is “the first word [used] about the new and usually also the last,” generally referring to “the offbeat, the Absurd, the Minimal or any other form of the unexpected.”

5 comments on ““Public Art” for Whom?”

  1. Kaley Beavers says:
    June 9, 2016 at 2:29 am

    Keep up the pleasant work.

    Reply
  2. club.caradisiac.com says:
    June 7, 2016 at 10:12 am

    I think this is among the most important information for me. And I am glad to read your article. . . . On some general things, the site style is perfect, the articles are really great. :-) Good job, cheers!

    Reply
    • Michelle Kamhi says:
      June 7, 2016 at 2:22 pm

      I’m glad you like it! Thanks for your comment.

      Reply
  3. Noella says:
    April 10, 2016 at 1:06 am

    I am truly grateful to the owner of this site
    who has shared this impressive post here.

    Reply
    • Michelle Kamhi says:
      April 10, 2016 at 11:17 am

      Thanks for your comment, Noella. It is gratifying to know that readers value what they find here. Please share it with your friends and colleagues!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to receive notice of new posts.

Return to Blog

About ‘For Piero’s Sake’

Who was Piero, and why was this title chosen? Read here.

Recent Posts

  • Debunking Jasper Johns
  • Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture
  • Lessons on Education from Books Our Children Read
  • Revisiting Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait
  • Remembering Howard McP. Davis

Share This Website

Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Email this to someone
email

Archives

  • January 2022
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • June 2020
  • January 2020
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014

{*} ©2022 Michelle Kamhi :: Site by KPFdigital :: Admin Login