ALAN writes:
Years ago I wrote about an array of rusting steel plates that occupy a city block in downtown St. Louis. They were put there in 1982 and officially called the “Twain Sculpture,” but usually referred to as the “Serra Sculpture,” after Richard Serra — the con artist who created the monstrosity. At that time and as if on cue, the city’s “Liberal” newspaper, the local intellectuals, and all public officials took turns gushing over it. They called it a work of “art”. Ordinary citizens called it a collection of junk. Not one bureaucrat or apparatchik on the public payroll ever called it anything but a work of “art”.
For 44 years, people walking or driving through downtown have had to look at the indescribably-ugly thing. What’s funny about that is: Souvenir shops have never sold framed portraits of the thing or miniature replicas for visitors to take home with them and remember it by. But the “official truth” was –and remains– that it is a work of “art”.
A few months ago, men built a fence around the thing. Why? Supposedly, to illustrate and accentuate its artistic merit — strange that 44 years went by before that idea occurred to anyone — and to protect the thing from being vandalized.
Law-abiding citizens who venture downtown are on their own against panhandlers, predators, thugs, car thieves, and philosophers on street corners who shout their philosophy to passers-by. But the city will build a fence around the “Serra Sculpture” monstrosity to “protect” it. At this point, you should be laughing uproariously. The city proposes to achieve the impossible: To prevent anyone from vandalizing an array of junk that is itself the very essence of vandalism to language, art, and thought.
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