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In defense of his work, Serra, 45, tends to talk like vintage Ayn Rand. "They don't live there," he says of the workers in Federal Plaza. "It's not a neighborhood. The Government doesn't ask them what chairs they want to sit on. Why should they vote on sculpture?" Through Tilted Arc, he told the March hearing, "the viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza . . . Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." One would think it was meant to be like the black slab in 2001, bestowing consciousness on oblivious apes.
The work, Serra insists, is "site-specific," designed for, and in terms of, a given spot. Remove Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza and, according to Serra, it will become the meaningless array of rusty metal that its opponents claim it already is.
Well, yes. It also happens that the world is full of formerly "site- specific" art, from the Elgin Marbles and the horses of San Marco to any number of detached frescoes and tombs that have not died from being moved. As the Great Structuralist in the Sky would put it, loss of context means enrichment by recontextualization, and site-specific is as site-specific does. What it does here is serve as a mere scrim for the question of Serra's rights as an artist who, much as his opponents may now resent it, can be argued to have had a binding deal with the Government.
This, surely, is the crux of the matter. The hearing brought scores of pundits opining that the "censoring" of the sculpture would be the moral equivalent of Hitler's book burning, that it would start an iconoclastic stampede against all public sculpture in America and so forth. But the central point is that Tilted Arc was, according to Serra, conceived and contracted between him and the GSA as a permanent installation in Federal Plaza, and that the GSA should not convene a hearing to change the rules four years after the closing whistle. If it wants to avoid such imbroglios it should try / slipping a public-acceptability clause into its future commissions, if it can draft one that holds water. That way a perfect level of mediocrity can be upheld for all time. But Tilted Arc should stay, if not as a source of general pleasure, then as a didactic monument to the follies that can arise at the juncture of undemanding patronage and truculent aestheticism.