Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" vs. Maya Ying Lin's "Vietnam Veterans Memorial"

Above is Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981).

It is a long, curvy piece of steel, twelve feet high and a hundred and twenty feet across.  The United States General Services Administration had an Art-in Architecture program, meant that a tiny bit of the cost of building a new government building would go towards having a piece of public art installed by the new building, as to make the building look more interesting.

They paid Richard Serra to make a piece of art to enhance the outside of the Federal Plaza in Foley Square in New York.  In 1981, Richard Serra had his Tilted Arc installed in Foley Square.  He designed it to fit exactly there.

If you go to the Federal Plaza and stand outside on Foley Square today, you won't see Tilted Arc there anymore.  That's because in 1989, they took it down.  The civil servants who worked in the Federal Plaza building didn't like Richard Serra's art.  They didn't like having to walk around his a hundred and twenty foot long steel wall.  They didn't like looking at it every time they happened to glance out the window.  And they thought it was making a dividing line on Foley Square, which muddled with the way people interacted with each other, and if they were having a jazz concert on the square, the musicians would have to arrange themselves around the metal wall.  The civil servants thought Tilted Arc looked kind of frightening and intimidating in its large size, as if it were towering over you.  

They insulted the art, and called it "a hideous hulk of rusty metal."  They even called it an iron curtain, comparing it the ultimate symbol of Soviet oppression and communism that divided Europe. 

They had a large legal argument that went on for years, and in the end, the civil servants won and they removed Tilted Arc.  Throughout the whole debate, they mostly saw the Tilted Arc as a wall and nothing else, ignoring its lilting shape and how it might have brought character, from one perspective, to an otherwise flat and rather plain square.  

Here is part of Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Veterans's Memorial (1982).  It is made of black granite and is five hundred feet long.  It still exists today in The Mall, in Washington, D.C.  

In 1981, Maya Ying Lin made a plan to make a piece of art that would "pay tribute to the 58,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam war and that would harmonize with the landscape" (607).  At first, people didn't like the plans Maya made, which involved having two walls of black granite that met together in the middle like an L, with the names of the soldiers enscribed on each of them.  They thought it looked to abtract and modern-ish.  

Later, after it was built, it became one of the most accepted pieces of public art ever made.  

There are a lot of similarities between Richard Serra's Tilted Arc and Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial.  Both are wall-like, dark in colour, and are on land owned by the government, and were both made and installed around the same time.  

Then why would one be removed, and the other accepted?  

Serra's art is, in some ways, making a line that went right through the symmetrical lines of Foley Park, while Lin's is in harmony with the landscape.  

Lin's art also is paying a tribute to soldiers who died in a war that disturbed a lot of people, which adds another sensitive element to the memorial.  It could also reach a wider audience, as people who might not understand or are confused by the industrial modernness of Serra's Tilted Arc could understand Lin's as being a memorial.  What else is a bit different is the glossy surface of Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflects the light and looks rather golden when reflecting the trees and sunlight, making it seem less frightening even in comparison to the playful lilted twist of Tilted Arc.