BIRD IN SPACE
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, 1928
So...a crate from Paris lands at New York customs, and the officers pry it open. Inside, packed in straw, four and a half feet of polished bronze. Narrow, curved, coming to a point. The paperwork says it's a sculpture called Bird in Space. Now, art enters America duty-free. But these guys look in the crate and see no wings, no feathers, no beak. No bird. Just a gold spike. So a customs man, a real man with a real stamp, rules that this is not art. He files it, and this is real, under Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies. A Brancusi. In with the soup ladles and the bedpans. Then they bill the owner forty percent, like it's a shipment of forks. The owner is Edward Steichen, maybe the most famous photographer alive. He does the most American thing possible. He sues. So now it's Brancusi versus the United States, an actual federal case, where lawyers put sculptors on the stand and ask them, under oath, to define a bird. The dumbest question of the century, and the whole future of art riding on it. But the question was the point. Brancusi spent decades on birds, taking something away every time. Feathers, gone. Feet, gone. Finally the bird, gone. What's left is the lift. He wasn't carving a bird. He was carving what a bird does. The law said sculpture had to imitate a natural object. This imitates nothing. On purpose. The crime was the achievement. Two years later, the court folds. There's a new school of art, the judge writes, it deals in ideas instead of copies, and like it or not, it exists. From a federal bench, that's practically poetry. We don't get it. It counts anyway. The bird from the trial has a brother. You're looking at it. Cast the same year as the verdict. Same bronze, same curve. Filed under sculpture this time. Still doing the only thing it ever wanted. Going up.