Master Vision_FINAL_4-2-18

On Saturday just before 9 p.m., as a baby blue dusk curled around the harbor and the lights of the
Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges began to twinkle in the distance, I stood on the third
floor of the Seaport and watched as the scaffolding of the Pier 35 falls seemed to evaporate. Only
a dancing column of water was left in the air, a primordial apparition that spoke of tropical heat and
dreams. The city itself seemed an enigma: Who knows how many similar mysteries it held?
Waterfalls is the sort of work that even New York’s former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, could appreciate. (The
twice-divorced, philandering moralist’s primary relationship with art consisted of his attempts to ban
work he considered offensive and to strip city funding from museums that supported such work.) It is a
critical hit (the Times’s Roberta Smith gushed over it in a review on Friday), and its $15.5-million price
tag was paid for almost entirely out of private funds ($2-million came from the state’s post-Sept. 11
body, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation).
Some funders were motivated out of pure self-interest: the head of the Circle Line Downtown, which is
a main supporter, told me his boat-cruise operation is doubling its number of daily departures from the
South Street Seaport, from 15 to 30. And the city’s most active developers, who stepped up with cash
and material assistance, are flush from Bloomberg’s pro-development policies.
But the bulk of the funds were raised from more than 200 individuals, businesses and foundations one
dollar at a time by the Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization which has produced more than 500
works since its inception in 1977.
Even if you don’t know the fund, you know some of the works, recent examples of which include the
return in the summer of 2000 of Jeff Koons’s flowering puppy, Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror in the fall
of 2006, and Takashi Murakami’s Reversed Double Helix, all at Rockefeller Center. Until July 19,
Rockefeller Center is hosting Chris Burden’s What My Dad Gave Me, also produced by the fund, a sixstory-high
skyscraper made from more than one million Erector Set pieces.
And I adored Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly Water Tower (2000), a translucent resin cast of the inside of a
water tower placed atop a building in SoHo. A cunning temporary intervention in the built environment, it
stopped me cold when it caught my eye, as public art should.
Last week, Bloomberg told the world’s media, “What is art to you doesn’t necessarily have to be art
to the other person, or doesn’t necessarily have to be the other person’s favorite, and I think we have
an obligation to our kids to open their eyes. They don’t have to become artists, they don’t even have
to grow up liking art, but we fail them if we don’t give them the opportunity to know it exists and to
experience it. And then, when they’re adults, they can make their own decisions.”
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Public-art advocates frequently speak about the need to cultivate artistic appreciation among children,
but I wonder if the emphasis isn’t misplaced. Children have a bottomless capacity for enchantment. But
to survive as an adult in New York, you have to form a second skin to protect yourself from daily threats
to your mind and body. New Yorkers aren’t rude; they’re just trying desperately to not succumb to the
sensory onslaught. Public art pierces the adaptive armor and briefly reminds people of why they came
to this city: Because it is a place of wonder that reveals itself anew every day, if you let it. And you don’t
have to be a billionaire to appreciate that.
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