Practice question · Multiple choice
Why is the Tilted Arc dispute instructive rather than simply a case of the public failing to appreciate art?
Hints
- Ask what each side was actually claiming.
- One claim was about the work; the other about the space and who uses it.
Show the answer
A. Both positions were real: the work was genuinely site-specific and the plaza was genuinely in daily use by people not consulted
Why
Because both claims were sound. The work was site-specific in exactly the sense Serra asserted, and it stood in a working plaza used daily by people who had not been consulted and found it obstructive. Collapsing the episode into philistinism or arrogance loses the thing that makes it worth teaching.
Practise Site: Form in Natural and Urban Space
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sculpture I is free to start.
More questions on Site: Form in Natural and Urban Space
- Which are true of Kwon's three senses of site?
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- Sort each demand by whether it belongs to a LANDSCAPE site or an URBAN one.
- A work in a gallery room can be site-specific.
- In what year was Tilted Arc removed from Federal Plaza?
- Complete the account of site.
- Match each concept to what it names.
- Arrange the events of the Tilted Arc dispute in order.
- Smithson's non-site was intended as documentation standing in for an inaccessible work.