When Public Art Is Orphaned
By DANIEL GRANT
July 17, 2008; Page D9

Back in 1970, Hyland Biological of Costa Mesa, Calif., paid sculptor Claire Falkenstein (1908-97) $20,000 to create a large-scale artwork that was installed in front of its building. The metal and glass piece was titled "DNA Molecule," and it greeted visitors for the better part of four decades. A couple of mergers later, the company (now called Valeant Pharmaceuticals) was moving 25 miles away and sold the building and the art as separate transactions. At a November Bonhams & Butterfields auction in San Francisco, the 18-foot-tall work went to a private collector for $150,250 -- far above the auction house's estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.

See photos of public artworks that were removed from their original sites.
Bonhams & Butterfields was stunned. "It took a lot of convincing to get us to take the Falkenstein in the first place," said Patrick Meade, the auction house's chief operating officer. "It's a very good piece, but how were we supposed to bring it into our auction room?" Instead, Bonhams and Butterfields ran a photograph in its catalog and advised prospective bidders to see the work in Costa Mesa. (The $150,250 purchase price didn't include the cost of disassembling the sculpture, moving it somewhere else and filling in the hole it left behind.)

With thousands of murals and sculptures in public spaces, the question of what to do with such art that its owner no longer wants is likely to come up more and more.

Some other examples:

• An environmental landscape called "Topo" created by Maya Lin for the City of Charlotte, N.C., back in 1991, interfered with the plans of an Atlanta-based real-estate developer, Pope & Land Enterprises, which bought the land (and the art on it) from the city in 2006.

• In 2000, when Comerica Bank relocated its branch within Detroit's Renaissance Center, its new site could not accommodate the 160-foot long mural by Glen Michaels, commissioned in 1975, that had to be removed from the old site.

• A Stephen Antonakos sculpture, "Neon for Southwestern Bell," commissioned by that company in 1984, is in the way of an improvement project in Dallas's central business district.

• Advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, which had amassed a collection of 8,000-10,000 works between 1965 and 1986, has spent the past 20 years disposing of it, including the three life-size bronze figures, commissioned from Bruno Lucchesi in 1966, that once graced the entrance to the elevators at company headquarters.

The usual fate of no-longer-wanted public art is to be junked (Pope & Land Enterprises offered Ms. Lin's 1,600-foot-long holly bush installation to several arboretums, museums and universities over a two-year period, but there were no takers); donated (AT&T gave the Antonakos to the city of Dallas, while Comerica split up the mural -- with the artist's consent and involvement -- and gave the parts to several hospitals and medical centers in Detroit); sold; or put in storage.

On occasion, the artists may get their work returned -- if they are willing to buy it back and pay to remove it. Commissioning agreements often include a right of first refusal, but "few artists can afford to buy their work back," said Scott Hodes, a Chicago lawyer who has negotiated such contracts.

Barbara Kelley
Bruno Lucchesi is a well-known artist whose larger pieces go for as much as $200,000. But Annette Fox, the corporate art consultant to J. Walter Thompson, says that Sotheby's, Christie's and "the galleries that work with Lucchesi weren't interested in handling" the sale of the ad agency's sculpture. Finally, she was able to consign the work to Litchfield County Auctions in Connecticut, where the piece was sold in late 2006 for $7,200, under the $10,000 to $20,000 estimate. Most public art declines in value as soon as it is first paid for.

Often, the most advantageous outcomes are donations. AT&T, for instance, had the 34-foot-high and 75-foot-long Antonakos piece appraised at $90,000 (three times what the artist was paid as a commission), for which it will take a deduction, and the work is expected to be reinstalled on a side of Dallas's convention center. For its part, Comerica had an appraisal of $350,000 for the Glen Michaels mural.

Doing an appraisal of a public artwork is more art than science. "There is no secondary market for public art, although some individual sales do take place," said Alex Rosenberg, a New York City appraiser. "In the appraising field, you call it 'appraising without comparables.' It's anything that sounds logical. It's the theory of being reasonable." As an example of logic and reason, "the cost of moving, refurbishing and insuring the work adds to its value."

Is something lost when these pieces, commissioned to stand in a specific site, are taken from one place to another? According to Tom Eccles, director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and former director of New York City's Public Art Fund, "people increasingly are questioning the very notion of site specificity. A work seen in one context can be very happily seen in another." In the terminology of the public-art field, such a work is "repurposed."

Outdoor statues and monuments have existed for millennia, of course, and towns and cities across the U.S. have statues to known and unknown soldiers of various wars, created by artists known as "monument builders." The names of most of these sculptors do not resonate with the public today. The term "public art" is a newer one, dating from the 1960s. The idea was to commission from renowned artists works that would be accessible to people who never set foot in a museum or gallery. The idea has caught on with individuals, churches and corporations, as well as with federal, state and local governments that instituted programs in which a portion of new construction costs would be used for the acquisition of publicly displayed art.

Government agencies are more apt to try to find a new home for displaced art than corporate and private owners. For instance, in 2000 the General Services Administration, whose Art-in-Architecture program has commissioned more than 350 artworks for federal buildings since 1965, relocated "Annual Ring" -- Nancy Holt's 14-foot-high, 30-foot-diameter hemisphere -- to a field on the campus of Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan after the nearby federal building in whose entranceway it had sat since 1981 was torn down.

The GSA is also looking for a new location for John Chamberlain's metal sculpture "Detroit Deliquescence," which had been commissioned for the McNamara Building in downtown Detroit in 1987; that federal building still stands, but the artwork was damaged by the elements and has been undergoing conservation since 2001.

And what of Richard Serra's 120-foot-long and 10-foot-high "Tilted Arc," that most famous -- or infamous -- GSA commission, which was cut up and removed from New York City's Federal Plaza in 1989 after a barrage of complaints by building employees? It has been in storage for almost 20 years now and there are no plans for it ever to see the light of day again.

Mr. Grant is the author of "The Business of Being an Artist" (Allworth).