Arc without Covenant

About 95 per cent of the artists who are hailed by critics, extolled by gallery owners, enshrined by museum curators, and blindly swallowed by the public are proved hacks by history. Competent, often even clever hacks, but hacks nonetheless. If you walk through any leading museum in the world today, you will see perhaps 3 to 5 per cent of the artists who were considered preeminent even as recently as a century ago. And how many of those are indispensable? I am not talking, of course, about special exhibitions of works by great artists, where the number of important and desirable works is much higher, though probably not so high as museum directors and other interested parties would have us believe.

“What is art?” is a question that has occupied a small but choice portion of humanity since long before Tolstoi published a rather philistine book by that title. But unlike many another endlessly debated subject, this one is worthy of continuous probing. For once it stops being debated, art will either become a monolithic, officially regimented mediocrity or cease to exist altogether—neither prospect particularly cheery. And a small but not insignificant part of the great debate has focused in recent years on Richard Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc. Commissioned by the General Services Administration for lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1979, it was installed in 1981 and, after immediate virulent public protest and lengthy litigation, removed in this year of grace. It raises both contemporary and sempiternal questions worth adverting to.

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John Simon

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About 95 per cent of the artists who are hailed by critics, extolled by gallery owners, enshrined by museum curators, and blindly swallowed by the public are proved hacks by history. Competent, often even clever hacks, but hacks nonetheless. If you walk through any leading museum in the world today, you will see perhaps 3 to 5 per cent of the artists who were considered preeminent even as recently as a century ago. And how many of those are indispensable? I am not talking, of course, about special exhibitions of works by great artists, where the number of important and desirable works is much higher, though probably not so high as museum directors and other interested parties would have us believe.

“What is art?” is a question that has occupied a small but choice portion of humanity since long before Tolstoi published a rather philistine book by that title. But unlike many another endlessly debated subject, this one is worthy of continuous probing. For once it stops being debated, art will either become a monolithic, officially regimented mediocrity or cease to exist altogether—neither prospect particularly cheery. And a small but not insignificant part of the great debate has focused in recent years on Richard Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc. Commissioned by the General Services Administration for lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1979, it was installed in 1981 and, after immediate virulent public protest and lengthy litigation, removed in this year of grace. It raises both contemporary and sempiternal questions worth adverting to.