Against Subway Art

In March 2019 an exasperated commuter superimposed a hint of self-awareness on one of the William Wegman Weimaraner mosaics installed at the 23rd Street F/M subway station the year before. “I suck,” said one of Wegman’s anthropomorphized dogs in the scribbled speech bubble. Within hours the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) had dispatched a team to remove the confession, proudly tweeting a photo of the wiped-clean tile surface.

Of course, the mosaic still sucks, and the grimy sepia station sucks even more, and the New York City subway even more than that. In lieu of addressing faulty century-old switchboards and decrepit stations, the MTA commissions art for its crumbling walls and, with ruthless efficiency, eliminates any threats to its regime of aesthetic banality. The problem is less one of gilding the lily than of nickel-plating the turd. Whether subway art can, or even ought to, not suck is as open a question today as it was for its earliest advocates.

The fact that the city’s subway is cobbled together from privately operated lines built at the turn…