Junked art work raises questions of value

The culture wars have come to St. Petersburg. In a pale re-enactment of a very public controversy played out in New York City between 1981 and 1989 over a sculpture by artist Richard Serra, Temple Beth-El and local sculptor Bradley Arthur are locked in combat over the destruction of The Wave/Quantum Fluctuation, a large work that sat outside the temple for more than 12 years.

The terms of their agreement ("long-term loan" or "abandoned property," depending on who describes it) and events culminating in the sculpture's demise are as opaque as a piece of sheet metal.

Arthur is suing the temple for compensation, using for legal precedent the Visual Artists Rights Act passed in 1991, largely the result of the Serra imbroglio. The famous and famously arrogant Serra, known for his massive, site-specific "land works," had been commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration to create a piece of public art for Federal Plaza in New York City.

Serra installed a postmodern curve of raw steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, titled Tilted Arc that cut the plaza space in half, causing inconvenience and annoyance to the hundreds of workers who had to walk around it every day. After much public debate, the GSA decided to remove it. Serra sued the GSA and lost, and the sculpture was carved into three pieces and carted to a scrap metal yard.

The events sparked a firestorm of debate about public art that still burns and unleashed questions about the definition of art that have led to deeper probings into censorship issues and First Amendment rights.

There are fundamental differences between the Richard Serra-GSA contentions and those of Arthur vs. Temple. Arthur's work, though it sat in a quasi-public space on private property, was not public art, nor was it a commissioned work owned by the Temple. And Arthur is not an artist of Serra's caliber.

But the merits of the art and legal ownership are not the issues. Moral ownership is.

The Visual Artists Rights Act simply put a legal imprimatur on a commonly held belief: You don't destroy art.

Then again, art is destroyed all the time. Artists quietly burn or bury work they consider inferior. And great-grandchildren routinely toss old landscapes moldering in granny's attic. British megacollector Richard Saatchi arrived home one day last year to find that a very valuable sculpture made of frozen blood that he kept in the freezer had melted down during a kitchen renovation. Should these destroyers of art be brought to justice?

No, not from a common sense or legal standpoint. The Visual Artists Rights Act was specific in its protections, which are meant mainly to safeguard artists' work in the public arena, and the act has many loopholes and exclusions.

The act requires a "diligent, good faith" and documented effort on the part of a building owner who wants to remove an artwork, and the owner has the right to do so if those requirements under the law have been satisfied.

The temple says it asked Arthur to remove the work; Arthur said he never heard from the temple. Resolving that dispute is up to the courts.

What's really a corker is that the alleged agent of destruction is Temple Beth-El. The temple's congregation is considered a group of sophisticated, sensitive people, many of them community leaders, who started and have fostered for 30 years one of the area's finest art shows, Festival Beth-El, coming up Jan. 25-27.

Most outdoor art is destroyed more insidiously.

Without the kings, czars, doges and emperors who commissioned and maintained public art for centuries in other parts of the world, public art in the United States is created and placed mostly through a process decided by committees and funded by corporations or governments at local, state and national levels. Communities glow with civic pride when new public art is unveiled, a measure of status and a yardstick of cultural awareness. Maintaining the art, however, often doesn't get much attention.

Outdoor art is always in the process of deterioration. Officials in Rome have worked for decades to retard the corrosive effects of pollution and the elements on the city's marble fountains and statues. But what about public art with less illustrious provenance?

When art changes because of elemental forces, becoming what some would call an "eyesore," is it no longer art? Should it be removed?

When tastes and mores change, and the public insists on adding fig leaves or veils to cover nudity, or repainting art a different color than the artist selected, is it still art as conceived by the artist?

When the land on which a work sits, and for which it was designed, is needed for other purposes and the art is moved, is it the same work of art?

The answers are easy when the work in question is a marble statue by Michelangelo, harder when it's an (allegedly) rusting metal abstraction of questionable merit.

We Americans have a spotty record in our treatment of art that gets in our way, physically, aesthetically or morally. Laws can go only so far in deciding how we resolve the great divide of opinion over what counts as art, who owns it and what that ownership entails.

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