LADY LIBERTY REKINDLES FIRE OF POPULIST ART

When we were much younger, the magnetic mass spectacle was a legendary rock concert at Woodstock. Its leitmotifs were Freedom, Love and a cheerful Disdain for Authority. This weekend, the mecca of popular pilgrimage is New York City and the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, whose themes are Freedom, Patriotism and Respect for Tradition.

As long as freedom is in there, we have hope. The change in sensibility, however, is as startling as sitting down on a missing chair.

Or is it?

Anybody who views the world through the sometimes prescient knothole of the art sphere has no business being surprised that this summer’s cult object is a colossal green lady in a spiked hat who in the ‘60s could serve only as a foil for anti-Establishment satire. Remember the popular poster of the beautiful nude hippie girl streaking in front of the Lady? Nobody could seriously celebrate anything in front of the Statue of Liberty except hip irony condescending to kitsch.

It is not just the physical being of the lovable Amazon that has been rehabilitated, it is her mystique. It is now possible to look at her, hat in hand, without sniggering. We are back to the days when a college kid on his grand tour could--unembarrassed--steam out of New York harbor with a lump in his throat the size of a basketball. We cannot quite yet do this at Mount Rushmore, but the problem is being worked on.

Brushing up Liberty’s copper raiment and her supporting girdle of girders took a couple of years. Getting her image back in shape has been longer a-comin’ and has demanded remodeling the general Zeitgeist, a task as enormous as it is amorphous. In the art world, this phenomenon has taken the form of historical revivalism. The trendy-sounding code word for all this is, of course, Post-Modernism.

In practice, the Post-Mod sensibility has functioned to bring a measure of respectability and romance back to all the art once scorned as either Populist schlock or tawdry arriviste vulgarism hereafter known as nouveau-kitsch. All the bronze pigeon-perch generals in the parks and all the marble palaces built by robber-baron millionaires are being re-evaluated. Sometimes they turn out to be the work of conservative geniuses like Augustus St. Gaudens or the architects McKim, Mead & White.

Sometimes they were Frederic Auguste Bartholdi.

What is truly amazing about Liberty Weekend is that for the first time since its making, the statue has an author with a name. For decades nobody even wondered who made the immense thing. It was an act of God, like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes.

Now mass-media publications are printing little histories of the wonderful personal vision of Bartholdi, the French academic artist who built the whole scheme with a little help from his friend Gustave Eiffel, the engineer of Paris tower fame.

Something is afoot here.

Respectable exhibitions and scholarly dictionaries on 19th-Century art now include people like Bartholdi, once cast into outer darkness as pompiers and lackeys of middle-class taste.

The social and political implications of Post-Modernist revivalism are obvious and either comforting or alarming, depending on one’s commitments, but the artistic issue may represent an even larger sea change.

It may just be that we are now willing to give Bartholdi identity as an artist because of a new appreciation for his ability to carry out a physically mind-boggling project whose expressive vectors are deeply moving to people.

Another big change. For more than a century, fine art prided itself on appealing to a small, cultivated audience while sometimes going out of its way to repel ordinary people. Do contemporary artists then hate Post-Modernism?

If it were so, they would be retreating into their garrets en masse; instead, they are surfing the new wave under the aegis of the code phrase public art. Some make their work accessible by decorative vacuity, others with a sophistication so shallow as to be a travesty of hermetic art. But all are somehow trying to express themselves more openly and directly to large audiences.

The fact that so much public art--such as Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc”--is greeted with public indifference or hostility suggests that the contemporary artist has gained his refinement at the expense of articulation. Not quite so. People weep before the radical simplicity of the Vietnam Veterans Monument in Washington and it’s not just the engraved names, it is the subliminal artistic message of the work.

Liberty Weekend is not just ephemeral hype and patriotic sentimentality. It is a serious art event that must be viewed with the crooked smile that murmurs, “Well, I’ll be damned.”