Public art doesn't always fit

We're back with another installment of "Art Gone Bad."

A few weeks ago I wrote about a bench sculpture that inexplicably had become a magnet for acts of depravity in Belltown. It's a fiberglass bench with steel plumbing pipes for legs. Some folks who live and work nearby have been trying to get rid of it for eight years, mostly because drug dealers and addicts gather there.

But the city wouldn't budge because it's more than just a bench. It's art.

Well, last week the neighbors finally got their way. The city arts commission voted to remove the art bench. In a few weeks it will either be reworked so nobody can sit on it, or, more likely, installed elsewhere.

It's the first time, at least that anyone at the art commission could recall, that public art in Seattle has been uprooted due to a public outcry.

"We are committed to keeping public art on display, but we also don't want to have artworks out there that are being chronically vandalized or misused," says Lori Patrick, spokeswoman for the city's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs.

When I first wrote on this subject, I was ridiculed by some artists and art critics. They said I was a dim reactionary missing an obvious point: Art doesn't hurt people. People hurt people.

This seemed like an odd take coming from people who spend their lives celebrating the power of art.

No, the art bench didn't force anyone to be a pimp or a junkie. But if good art can help revitalize a public space — as is often claimed — then why can't art that is poorly chosen or is simply bad lead to the opposite?

It's a variation on the broken-windows theory. I love public art and think it brings incalculable energy to a city. But there are places where it feels like the art drains the charge rather than sparking it.

Ballard's Jeremy Mattox has a nominee. He says his neighborhood has been under an art pall for three years due to "five towering thingamajiggers" — sculptures on top of cedar posts called "Witness Trees," erected in Bergen Place Park in Ballard's downtown.

"Whereas the Belltown art bench attracts crime and litter, our public art repels most anything a rational person would associate with humanity," he says.

Gerald Guite, of Normandy Park, has been demoralized by the same work of art nearly every day since 1979.

It's called "Earthwork at Johnson Pit #30." It's located in what used to be a gravel pit in SeaTac overlooking the Kent Valley. The county had a worthy idea of reclaiming some of these wastelands as giant sculptures.

So an artist terraced the 4-acre site and put in 16 tree stumps painted black with tar, called a "ghost forest."

In a sign at the site, the artist says it wasn't his goal to refurbish the gravel mine into an idyllic, attractive place. That would have "socially redeemed those who wasted the landscape in the first place."

Guite says the artist got his wish.

"It's an ungodly place," he says. "Which is saying something, because it has such a great view of the valley."

Dozens of readers sent examples of art they think has gone bad. "Aurora Borealis," those glare-inducing towers of multicolored metal in the water alongside the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. "The Wall of Death," that spiky contraption beneath the University Bridge that often doubles as a trash dump.

The art I loathe most is "The Kingstones," a hideous sculpture of a family watching television on the sidewalk at the front door to the KING-5 studios on Dexter Avenue North. It's there because a car once crashed into the building, and KING execs wanted art that would double as a car blockade. It seems they got a people repellent, too.

Kurt Kiefer, who made the Belltown art bench, was kind enough to respond to me despite the bad things I've written about his "evil bench," as he put it. He says I'm sliding down a slippery slope.

"If my bench is disliked for attracting illegal activity, then it could very well make sense to move it," he e-mailed. "If, on the other hand, a resident of the block just doesn't like it because they think it's ugly, or because they don't agree with the artist's premise or because they simply hate the notion of art in public places, then that's obviously a different story."

Agreed. I'm not advocating a mass art purge. But art isn't sacred, either.

Kiefer urged me to write about something that matters. Race, gentrification, poverty, global warming, fortified-wine sales or bus rapid transit would all make better topics, he suggested.

Sorry. Art always matters. And not only when we appreciate it.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.