"The center’s mixed messaging is incarnated in the Janus-faced facade of the tower whose eccentric cuts and grooves from some angles..."

"... can bring to mind the heroic architecture of Louis Kahn or a Noguchi sculpture. When sunlight after a rain turns the gray stone pink, the building can look like a beacon. But from other angles, it’s cold and forbidding. That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub.... From the street the carved granite words from Selma are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box. Standing just below it in Jackson Park, the tower looms like a castle keep, its mass and height in tension with the park’s pastoral beauty and origins...."

Writes the NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, in "Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower/In Chicago, the $850 million Obama Presidential Center aims to remake a neighborhood with a 19.3-acre community hub and a brooding 225-foot museum." (NYT).

"I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble."

Said Richard Serra, quoted in "For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. He was known as the Man of Steel. But the sculptor was also an eternal poet, reshaping our perception of space, says our critic" (NYT).

The Times critic Michael Kimmelman begins:

... Richard Serra died yesterday....

 It continues:

"Nearly everything about Michael Heizer’s land art megasculpture called 'City' can seem hard to fathom."

"That it’s a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, smack in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert, where what passes for a neighbor is Area 51. That the nearest blacktop is an hour’s drive away, on a dusty, bumpy, former livestock trail, across a couple of mountain ranges. That it cost $40 million to build. Even that it’s called 'City.' It’s a city in name only. Exquisitely groomed dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions like dry lake beds spread out in no immediately obvious order and in different directions.... It’s meant to be trekked and explored on foot, slowly, at eye level, where the site swallows you up.... There are moments I’ve resented trudging from one end of the site to the other, through the dirt and the heat or cold, waiting for an epiphany.... It is bravado, awesome and nuts...."

From "It Was a Mystery in the Desert for 50 Years/In a remote Nevada valley, the artist Michael Heizer’s astonishing megasculpture is finally revealed" by Michael Kimmelman (NYT).

"Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture..."

"... whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.... [S]culpture skeptics from Leonardo through Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium. 'Carib art,' is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins. Racism notwithstanding, Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures...."

From an essay by Michael Kimmelman, published in the NYT in 2008, which I'm reading this morning because I blogged it at the time with my tag "sculpture" and I'm going through all my old posts with that tag looking for things that deserve my new tag "destruction of art."

The new tag is something I'd thought about creating for a very long time. I've been interested in violence directed at art much longer than I've been writing this blog — at least as far back as 1974 — but somehow my resistance to tag proliferation kept me from breaking this subtopic out of my generic topics "sculpture" and "art." There was also the "protest" tag. "Destruction of art" is (usually) a subtopic of that one too. But the pulling down of statues of Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key — last night in San Francisco — finally dragged me over the line.

Speaking of Junipero Serra, I remember Richard Serra and his "Tilted Arc." I was one of the workers of lower Manhattan in the 1980s who rankled at the hostility the artist expressed toward mere pedestrians. I've written about that a few times. The people in the plaza have feelings and interests and may richly resent the impositions of artist ego and elitist civic pride. Once art is in place, it demands admiration, and what happens? It might be ignored — that's what Kimmelman fretted about — and it might be attacked — the present-day rage.

I'd like to look up what the "sculpture skeptics" — Leonardo, Hegel, Diderot, Baudelaire, et al. — had to say. Oddly, they — at least some of them — expressed racism. The sculpture skeptics of today style themselves as anti-racists. But there's resonance in Kimmelman's summary of the skepticism:

Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. 

We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal.

ADDED: From "Why Sculpture Is Tiresome" in "The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Baudelaire":

"And does one really need to point out why it’s so rich of those who argue for states’ rights to argue against site-specific architecture, stylistically conceived to suit America’s diverse cultures..."

"... and instead favor obedience to a mandate from Washington? Or to explain that disagreements about architectural style speak to a healthy, democratic society in action? After all, there is no single style of architecture that represents nationhood — or that does not, and should not, provoke debate. The executive order borrows language from the 'Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture' that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1962 when the future senator was working in Kennedy’s Labor Department. Moynihan believed that federal architecture 'must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American government.' The new proposal also refers to dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability. But it undoes the key principles on which, as Moynihan made clear, those goals depend — that design must 'flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa,' because expertise matters, and that 'an official style must be avoided.'"

From "MAGA War on Architectural Diversity Weaponizes Greek Columns/The Trump administration may impose a classical style on new federal buildings, a proposal aimed at the heart of modernism and diversity" by the NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman.

Listening to rooms.

Michael Kimmelman has "Dear Architects: Sound Matters" in the NYT — with audio revealing the subtle audio dimension of various places.

The spaces we design and inhabit all have distinctive sounds. The reading rooms at the New York Public Library have an overlay of rich sound. Your office may be a big room in a glass building with rows of cubicles where people stare into computer screens. It may be sealed off from the outside, and you may think it is quiet....

That reminded me of the scene in "Living in Oblivion" — a movie about making a movie — where at one point everyone needs to stop making any noise so the sound technician can record the "room tone":



AND: Here's some mockery of room tone:

A kockeputzi.

"I remember liking the present Museum of Modern Art before it opened in 2004. For the life of me, I can’t now imagine what I was thinking. An aged New Yorker, visiting from Florida, not long ago happened upon the new Whitney. A 'kockeputzi,' she called it. Yes, it is a mishmash. But buildings take time to reveal their true selves."

From Michael Kimmelman's NYT article about the new Whitney Museum.

I don't know about the museum, but I'm enjoying the word kockeputzi.

You may call it "Brutalism," but "the government center was conceived with lofty social aspirations" — a vision "of energetic governance as a democratic ideal."

Michael Kimmelman champions a frighteningly ugly government building, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center.

He seems to especially like the ideas that underlie the design, as if beautiful abstractions can transform how the tangible thing looks and feels. Actually, I don't get the aesthetic grandeur of the abstraction of "energetic governance," so even if I was sure the building embodied the ideal, it wouldn't make me see the building as beautiful.

Kimmelman stresses that the building is on the "global watch list" of the World Monuments Fund "alongside landmarks like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China." But it's on the endangered monuments list because it's endangered, not because it's of equal distinction.

Maybe it should be preserved because it's a distinctive example of a style of architecture that seemed good at the time but most of us happen to hate right now. That swooping arc of taste tells us to be careful. I remember in the 1970s when modern buildings were loved with a doctrinaire certainty and overdecorated buildings reviled. I used to look at Grand Central Station every day, back then, and think that it was a monument to the misguided taste of the past.



Would I have torn it down? No. I have a conservative streak, and I don't trust transitory judgment. I would, however, if given the power, have ripped out that damned Pan Am building that filled the visual space above it.

Skepticism about the value of sculpture: "Carib art," as Baudelaire said, racistly.

Translated by Michael Kimmelman, the notion is that "even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins."

Kimmelman strips the poet's point of its seeming racism and restates it:

Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures.

Is this true? I would think that the sculpture we love is precisely that which retains a connection to "primitive" cultures and religious tradition. Even when that stuff is kind of bad, we may feel some emotion worth experiencing. It's all that bad modern sculpture, especially the stuff that clutters our path in the real world that makes us leery of the 3D concoctions of artists. At least paintings stick to the wall.

... Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided [sculpture] as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.

Nowadays, we may not care about looking at the painting either. We have our own goals and destinations, and the paintings stay humbly out of the way, to be looked at if we choose, but the bold efforts of the sculptors rudely occupy our space. The problem with sculpture is not that people today reject the aura of old cults and religions, it's that we are so over the boring, outsized egos of modern artists.

(This rejection of the ego of the modern sculptor was exemplified for all time by the "Tilted Arc" that enraged New Yorkers — what? were they not sophisticated?! — back in the 1980s.)