This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford Unversity Press. If artifacts do not accord with the consumerist ideology, if they do not submit to exploitation and marketing strategies, they are threatened or committed to oblivion. This places Serra's work within some of the most contested of discursive spaces. Though Serra's contract, like most contracts for public art work, sought to guarantee the sculpture's maintenance in the site it was commissioned for, the government was able to break the contract, moving, and subsequently destroying, the work.
Property rights take precedence.
Thus, such work begins from an implicitly materialist assumption about the institutional structuring of experience. In this way it makes possible the important argument that institutional spaces cannot simply be abandoned but must be worked with and transformed. These concerns are spelled out in Serra's earlier writing and interviews, such as the 1980 interview with Douglas Crimp in which Serra highlights the importance of context in thinking through the potential of any public sculpture. The battles over the NEA are only one of the domestic sites touched by multinational capitalism's reprivatization efforts. The theoretical category of the aesthetic defended by bourgeois critics emerged with the historical transition to a capitalist mode of production.