A few years ago, internationally famous sculptor Patrick Dougherty, who works with natural materials to make striking objects from sticks, came to Waco and created a sculpture in beautiful Cameron Park along the banks of the Brazos. Cultural Arts of Waco, the organization that brought him here, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to do so. His work called River Vessels stood less than a year before it was vandalized so badly that it had to be torn down. It was not one of Waco’s finest hours. The following is an excerpt from a talk I gave at McLennan Community College shortly after the whole sorry affair.

…Let me read a letter to you that was published in the Waco Tribune-Herald last week, entitled “Sticking it to us.”

Congratulations to the Waco Cultural Arts Fest organizers who absolutely wasted $25,000 from a National Endowment for the Arts grant to build the “River Vessels” stick sculpture in Cameron Park. It lasted less than a year. It was a perfect target for vandals, benefited only art admirers, local tree huggers and a few college kids.

Now it has been torn down. That grant money could have been used to purchase art supplies to teach area school children art or to display their artwork in local public buildings or other institutions.

I suspect stick sculptor Patrick Dougherty is grinning all the way to the bank.

               –Mr. X, from Elm Mott, Texas

Before I go too far forward in my talk, I’d like to highlight three items within this letter that catch my eye. The first is his assumption that River Vessels “benefited only art admirers,” with the implicit notion that that group is only a small elite segment of the area population. But I bet that the question “Do you like art?” would be answered in the positive by far more people than our letter writer hints at here. But his tone sets up that portion of the population—that is, “arts admirers”—as a tiny minority, whose interests and tastes are by definition in opposition to the rest of the people. As an “arts admirer” I’d like to know how you answer that. Do the arts have a public relations problem?

A second item here is the fact he condemns art in the park as inevitably being the target of vandals, but then blesses the teaching of art to children. I’m certainly not going to condemn arts education–far from it–but I find it provocative that he’s willing to countenance the teaching of something which he might well, given his track record, disapprove the results of if he ran across it in the park or in a public building.

The third element of his letter that vexes me is his assumption that Patrick Dougherty, a kind, modest and charming man, who’s completely sincere about the capacity of his art to bring people together, is somehow a charlatan who gleefully bilks his gullible supporters. After all, that’s what a member of a shady elite would do, right? I’ve said it before: watching an artist work is key to understanding what he’s thinking, and Mr. Dougherty is warm and forthcoming with all he hopes to achieve through his art.

Now some of the commonalities in all these things is the underlying question of the proper role of art in society, specifically in an egalitarian democracy, and the implicit difference between the way the broader public, and artists and their supports, see art itself. And none of these issues is particularly new.

Fifty years ago, the art critic Leo Steinberg published an essay with the provocative title “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public.” In it, he described what might be called an “understanding gap” between working artists and the public, along with the parallel tendency of the public to be confused—if not completely put off—by what contemporary artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were then creating.

Decades later, that plight hasn’t diminished much. It’s true that looking at a lot of what is today celebrated as art, much of the public can register only confusion. If the plight is any less than Steinberg diagnosed in 1962, it may be because more and more people, such as our friend from Elm Mott, have simply dismissed contemporary art as something that has no capacity to speak to them in a meaningful way.  We need to find a way to reverse that trend.

River Vessels, Cameron Park, Waco, Texas