One morning in the early 1960s, in the acid afterglow of a Grateful Dead performance somewhere in Los Angeles, guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia paid a visit to the Watts Towers. A small network of cement and steel towers colored in by glass and tile mosaics, the Towers were built by an Italian immigrant named Sabato "Simon" Rodia, who turned found junk into art over the course of several decades outside his bungalow in the Watts neighborhood.
As the sun rose, Garcia reflected on the fact that the city of Los Angeles had recently tried and failed to demolish the Watts Towers. There were practical challenges: The Towers were sturdy, and the wreckers couldn't easily pull them down. And before long, a nascent preservationist group stepped in to ensure that this monumental work of outsider art would stand indefinitely, a lasting artistic legacy that California tourism boards would forever after describe as "iconic" in their promotional materials.
"Bummer," thought Garcia. "Nothing's supposed to last forever." Or something like that. (It's been a while since I've seen Long Strange Trip, the documentary in which he recounts this anecdote.) Garcia didn't want to bust his ass every day to create something permanent. He wanted his work as an artist and musician to be dynamic and alive. "I'd rather have fun," Garcia said.
You can't tear down a Grateful Dead show. The recordings are a nice copy, but everybody knows it's not the same thing. The actual artwork, created live in the room, is already gone. It vanishes with the sunrise and is recalled with varying degrees of fidelity by people whose memories are fried by the passing of time and, you know, all that acid.
Garcia must have had a complicated relationship with the reality that his work was in his own lifetime becoming monumentalized, trapped in stone. Despite the band's best intentions, the Grateful Dead became iconic. For some artists, there could be no worse fate, especially as the bar for icons has gotten lower and lower over the years.
I get it. Take the visual landscape of Dallas. We have precious few icons and a reputation for short memories in this town, so we may play a little fast and loose with the icon label. I love the Art Deco buildings at Fair Park. Unquestionably iconic, to my mind. There's Big Tex, the Pegasus, Reunion Tower, maybe the Tango Frogs. After that, pretty slim pickings, which is maybe how the Akard Street whale mural in downtown Dallas, created by artist Robert Wyland (who has done over 100 of these things in cities around the world), wound up getting claimed as "iconic" in a flood of recent articles about the 26-year-old artwork getting painted over for a FIFA advertisement ahead of this summer's World Cup.
Talk about a serious bummer: Iconic or not, the whales were a whole lot better than another building-sized advertisement in a neighborhood where even the sidewalks are already studded with commercials. The aging Dallas City Hall, a piece of Brutalist architecture that will be described as iconic in any articles about its possible demise, would be a whole lot better than a casino owned by the Dallas Mavericks. But focusing on the "iconic," a theme in all these conversations about the seemingly dismal future of downtown Dallas, risks ignoring the things that actually make downtown feel so dead.
That iconic whale mural turned FIFA advertisement? It looks out on a parking lot, often empty. City Hall? Surrounded by a concrete dead zone where almost nothing ever happens, except for the occasional protest that is siloed off from the rest of the city because it's being held in a concrete dead zone. The problems with my beloved Fair Park and its iconic buildings are well-documented. Dallas likes to brag about the size of the city's Arts District and its murderers' row of architectural beauties designed by iconic names — it's a total ghost town, too. Turns out a Rem Koolhaas does not automatically translate into a lively neighborhood.
The most exciting part of downtown Dallas is Klyde Warren Park, a functional greenspace built over a highway. It's devoid of architectural or artistic icons and full of people eating, playing, having a good time with a community of strangers who share a basic metro residency. It's a model of public space in a city center, dynamic and open to unexpected interactions.
Icons look good in Instagram posts and marketing materials for the visitors bureau. They're a rallying point, with clear symbolic power at which we can direct simple and strong emotions regarding how we feel about our city. That's why they're icons, and it's why they're often so boring. Icons are simple. Cities are messy and improvisational, flawed and human, iterating in weird and novel ways around old traditions, more like a Grateful Dead show than an I.M. Pei.
In downtown Dallas, our icons failed us a long time ago. The status quo sucks. What comes next could be even worse: corporate advertisements plastered on every remaining surface, to be seen by nobody. Commercials playing to empty expanses of concrete. An island owned by casino magnates who don't even live in Texas. Another company run off to Collin County. More parking lots.
Or we could stop caring so much about what's iconic and start having a little more fun.