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Sam Wagstaff, Photography Giant — and Public Art?
Beyond the Detroit Institute of Arts Debacle
Few remember Sam Wagstaff was more than the elegant titan who made photography into art and made Robert Mapplethorpe, too. The curator, collector, and insider didn’t agree that the public was just another word for the art-ignorant, and therefore ignorable. The patrician had a populist sensitivity. When SoHo snarled from its grimy cobbles elitist how dare theys at the “public” who protested Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in 1985, Sam Wagstaff didn’t damn the public. With them, he railed against that 120 foot long, 12 foot high arc of rusting core-ten steel that leaned menacingly to bisect the once-traversable plaza.
Sam had left his curatorial position at the Detroit Institute of Arts when his ill-fated installation of Michael Heizer’s “Dragged Mass Displacement” gouged their lawn. It wasn’t the public who complained, it was the DIA Board. The fiasco impelled Sam to move back to New York, and that’s when I met him in 1972. He underlined that move to me with the jibe so repeated since, “It was a triumph of lawn over art, wasn’t it.” It was not a question when he intoned it — a trait of his when he knew he was right and he didn’t care if anyone else agreed.
By 1985 in New York public art was loud in that time of ephemeral plenty — and AIDS was still revving up from a…
