Richard Serra and the beauty of making disagreeable art
🌙 The moon is in its waning crescent phase tonight — it will keep getting skinnier until it crosses the sun’s path during Monday’s total solar eclipse.
Today: Death of a sculptor, Einstein’s doctoral thesis, and why you shouldn’t aim to be happy. Written by Harris Sockel.
Richard Serra — the celebrated sculptor whose imposing walls of steel grace airports, remote landscapes, and art museums — died last week. His work is “rarely described as beautiful,” writes artist Ana Sofía Camarga, but beauty isn’t always the point of art.
Serra’s goal was not to beautify space, but to make us more aware of it. He famously filed a $30 million lawsuit against the U.S. government for taking down a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high wall of rusty steel he’d installed in Lower Manhattan. The goal, he claimed, was to interrupt people’s commutes and make them reconsider the space around them. (It was pretty successful by that standard, but annoyed New Yorkers in the process. Most people thought it was ugly and blocked the sun.)
Everything I’ve read about Serra, like this profile in which he’s described as “uncompromising and endlessly argumentative,” tells me he probably relished the opportunity to make something people disagreed with. He viewed art as a provocation. “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing,” he once said. “Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”
I found one more Serra gem in the Medium archive — it’s a report written by a student journalist at NYU Local back when the artist spoke at The Strand Book Store in 2014. Serra threw shade at the art scene for being, basically, boring — and encouraged more young people to break the rules and make disagreeable art. “It doesn’t take many people, maybe five or six, to get together with a strong idea and say, ‘To hell with the rest of it’ and do their thing.”
What else we’re reading
- Albert Einstein’s doctoral thesis was just 24 pages, which is too short for a PhD thesis today. (Most contemporary theses are at least 100 pages.) It concerned the value of Avogadro’s number, used to determine the number of atoms or electrons in a substance.
- Don’t try to control how your children will remember you because it’s a losing game, writes GB Rogut in The Mom Experience. “We must keep in mind that what our children will remember the most is how we made them feel,” and those feelings are theirs and not yours.
- Man, someone at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District in Cleveland is just having so much fun at their job: “How to prepare your plumbing for the total solar eclipse.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about life’s purpose
Advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Medium writer Darius Foroux: The purpose of life is not happiness, it’s usefulness.
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