VANTHORPE — The city's newly installed public sculpture, Threshold/Becoming III, has now stood at the corner of Delancey Avenue and Civic Center Drive for eleven weeks, and has, by every measurable metric, failed to spark a single conversation.

The $340,000 work, a seventeen-foot rust-patinated steel structure described in its commission brief as "a somatic dialogue with the urban landscape and the bodies that traverse it," has instead produced 47 written complaints to the city, a Change.org petition with 1,203 signatures titled "What Is That," and one call to emergency services from a tourist who believed a construction crane had collapsed.

The Vanthorpe Arts Commission, which approved the piece after a fourteen-month selection process involving seventeen artists, four community forums, and a catered retreat, maintains that the work is functioning as intended.

"Confusion is a form of conversation," said Meridith Solloway-Plank, the commission's Director of Transformative Public Engagement and Placemaking Outcomes. "When a resident stops and says, 'what is that supposed to be,' they are, whether they realize it or not, participating in an active aesthetic discourse."

"When a resident stops and says, 'what is that supposed to be,' they are, whether they realize it or not, participating in an active aesthetic discourse."

The sculpture was created by Benedikt Aurel Haas, a Berlin-based artist whose previous works include a conceptual absence installed in a Rotterdam parking garage and a sound piece consisting entirely of frequencies below human hearing. Haas has described Threshold/Becoming III as "a refusal," though he declined to specify what it was refusing.

City Councilmember Doug Parrish, who voted for the commission budget in 2021, said he had not personally visited the sculpture but had driven past it twice and found it "fine."

"It's fine," Parrish said. "It's art. You're not supposed to like it necessarily."

A survey conducted by the Vanthorpe Parks and Public Spaces Department found that the median time a pedestrian spent looking at the sculpture was four seconds, with the most common written response to the question "what does this piece make you think about?" being the word "parking."

Dr. Linnea Osch-Whitmore, Associate Professor of Public Aesthetics and Civic Semiotics at the Greater Calwell Institute for Applied Humanities, said the response was not unusual for abstract civic art.

"The gap between what an arts commission believes a sculpture will do and what the public actually does in its presence is, historically, a chasm," she said. "In this case the chasm appears to be approximately $340,000 wide."

The two noise complaints about the wind were filed on separate occasions by the same resident, who described the sound as "like a sad trombone, but worse."

The city has no plans to remove the piece, which carries a thirty-year maintenance contract valued at an additional $18,000 per year. A plaque explaining the work's conceptual framework is expected to be installed by spring, in a font the commission describes as "intentionally difficult."