Richard Serra, whose massive steel sculptures – the less artistically inclined among us would describe them as walls – were the source of controversy and a federal lawsuit, has died at age 85. Serra gained widespread notoriety in the ’80s when he used a commission from the federal government for a public sculpture in a New York plaza to erect “Tilted Arc,” a raw steel wall 120 feet long and 12 feet high that spanned most of the plaza. If Serra intended the piece to disrupt onlookers’ sense of space, perhaps he miscalculated how they’d feel about having their space thus disrupted.
Artists and critics liked and defended “Tilted Arc,” but people who had to work in the buildings it was designed for – Serra declared it site-specific and said moving it would destroy it – despised it. Unfortunately for Serra, those workers included federal judges, so he unsurprisingly lost his lawsuit to save the piece, and it was dismantled in 1989. It remains in storage in a Maryland warehouse, but his other works are in public squares all over the world.
“Crumblin’ Down,” the lead single to Mellencamp’s 1983 album “Uh-huh,” was the first to carry his real last name – until that point he had been marketed as John Cougar. According to Mellencamp, it’s “a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president – he was deregulating everything and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.”
