The late Richard Serra was perhaps the most intensely hated artist of the later 20th century by the public because wealthy institutions loved to ruin pretty downtown parks for office workers just wanting to eat their lunch amidst greenery by installing one of his giant rusting metal walls smack in the middle of it. As I blogged in 2002:
In Pasadena, Caltech foolishly hired Richard “Tilted Arc” Serra to create a “world class” sculpture on the grassy lawn where hard-working nerds like to relax by tossing the old Frisbee around. Not exactly surprisingly, Serra responded by designing one of his typical viewer-victimizing Berlin Walls to split the field in half, block the sightlines, and potentially break the necks of the Frisbee players. The students have been protesting and the college administration is trying to maintain a low profile. Go nerds!
But I’ve actually seen a Richard Serra sculpture that adds to rather than detracts from the landscape.
But I’ve seen a 300-ton Serra sculpture that adds to rather than detracts from the landscape because it is in the natural habitat of a Serra: on the manicured 3-acre front lawn of some Master of the Universe in the Hamptons. pic.twitter.com/wryWQ0CYT3
Instead of ruining some public space, it was in the natural habitat of a Serra: on the manicured 3 acre front lawn of some Master of the Universe in the Hamptons (which is likely the most modern art-oriented suburb in the country).
It’s this guy’s private lawn so you don’t have to waste part of your limited lunch hour navigating around it, it’s a rather pleasant shape for a Serra, and it’s off to the side of the lawn in front of trees rather than diagonal down the middle. So, it’s actually popular with passers-by. From the New York Times:
Home Is a Sculpture Garden, but the Art Doesn’t Stop at the Door
Monumental works by Serra, Noguchi and many others occupy the grounds, and the collection of Louise and Leonard Riggio continues inside their house.
By Hilarie M. Sheets
July 10, 2019A 300-ton steel sculpture by Richard Serra snakes across the lawn of Leonard and Louise Riggio’s Tudor-style mansion in Bridgehampton, N.Y. “The Serra has become a landmark here,” Mr. Riggio, executive chairman of Barnes & Noble, said of the Minimalist serpentine structure clearly visible from the road.
When people wander onto the grounds to peer up close, he will often come out and invite them to look out back at some two dozen other sculptures integrated into the 12-acre landscape by artists including Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Maya Lin, Walter De Maria and Louise Nevelson—much to the dismay of his wife, who has concerns about privacy. “I told her I want to open it up to the public. She almost killed me,” he chuckled.
Personally speaking, Leonard Riggio has made my life better over the last 30 years by furnishing his huge bookstores, so I’m on his side. It’s hard to remember how bad bookstores were in the 1970s and 1980s, but @Super70sSports should do a series of tweets on B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Crown.
Living on the North Side of Chicago from 1982-2000, I discovered the superb small Stuart Brent bookstore downtown on North Michigan Avenue (the Magnificent Mile) in 1983. It was the kind of store where’d you see Saul Bellow dressed head-to-toe in Burberry from across the street. (Dress British and think Yiddish.) And there was a fine bookstore devoted to stage plays on Broadway and some good used bookstores on Clark. Yet, in one of the higher brow neighborhoods in America, there were, basically, no good general bookstores in the 1980s or early 1990s.
But then in the mid-1990s, suddenly there were book superstores and Amazon online.
I’d probably be a well-to-do corporate executive today if my bookish intellectual side weren’t so catered to from three decades ago.
Anyway, Mr. Riggio seems like a good guy so I’m glad he found the right place to display Richard Serra’s talents.
