PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS IN CONFLICT.

PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS IN CONFLICT. The Vanity Fair article quotes Frank Gehry as saying: “And then the artists got competitive and said, No, you’re still an architect, because you’re putting toilets in your buildings, in your art. Richard Serra dismissed me as a plumber.” (Richard Serra is a sculptor.) It is sometimes claimed that there is a long history of animosity between artists and architects, in part on a theory that the buildings are at war with the art inside. Friends of mine who were architects told me that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York was Wright’s vengeance on painters. In the Vanity Fair article, Renzo Piano is quoted defending Gehry’s Bilbao museum against charges that “Bilbao upstages the art.”