ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

Tilted Arc was imposed upon this neighborhood without discussion,
without prior consultation, without any of the customary dialogue
that one expects between government and its people. The National
Endowment for the Arts panel of three selected the artist and a three
person group from the General Services Administration in Washington,
D.C., approved the design. No one else—not from the community
or its representatives, not the architects, not even the Regional
Administrators—was ever consulted. These panels, no matter how
expert or how well-intentioned, are not so omnipotent or infallible in
their judgments that they cannot be challenged or improved upon. 53
Arguably, the seeds of this argument—that Tilted Arc was absolutely inap-
propriate to the site because the top-down decision-making process, dictated by
small review panels of art experts and bureaucrats, did not involve the members of
the local community—has had the most far-reaching impact on the direction of the
public art discourse of the 1990s. Even before the blowup over Tilted Arc, some
public artists and administrators had recognized that the site of a public art work
had to be imagined beyond its physical attributes. Ideally, the work should engage
the site socially, instigating “community involvement.” But initially, this seems to
have been motivated primarily by the need to forestall potentially hostile reception
of certain public art works. In 1979, for example, when the NEA requested that its
grant recipients provide “methods to insure an informed community response to
the project,” 54 the community was still conceived as an inadequately prepared audience.
The community, in other words, needed to be engaged in order to soften
them to the “best art of our time,” to educate them in its proper interpretation and
appreciation (not unlike the way audience groups are commonly treated in
museums). 55
But by the late 1980s, and certainly by the time of Tilted Arc’s removal,
“community involvement” meant more. At the bureaucratic level, it meant the ex-
panded inclusion of nonart community representatives in the selection panels and
review committees of public art commissions. More significantly, it suggested a dia-
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SITINGS OF PUBLIC ART: INTEGRATION VERSUS INTERVENTION