This weekend I was in New Jersey for the wedding of one of my best friends. I was staying at her parents' home, along with other guests of the wedding, and we all found ourselves in the midst of a fiercely personal battle between the bride and her mother over the wedding dress. It was, in its way, rather unimportant, but the ferocity of the words, the gathering weight of Mom's threats and Daughter's tears, and the clenching negotiations for a truce, made it hard for me to find the line between the public and the private. On the one hand, we were all close friends or family members, and so the argument took on a public dynamic, with us as the audience. In other words, we could stay and listen. On the other hand it was a private matter, and instinct seemed to stress discretion—find another room, go elsewhere. Another guest retreated to the patio outside, waiting anxiously for the storm to blow over.
My solution was a "compromise" —I went into the next room, sat very still, and focused all my energy on my ears.
On the surface, public is simply that which is owned or intended for a society of people, for a common good. And private is simply that which is owned by or intended for an individual, or a particular group of people. But public and private are more than this—they are also outlooks, moods and modes for interfacing with reality. The public is a heroic pose, the striving for connection with that which is outside of us, that which is bigger than us. The private allows for intimacy, frailty and doubt, smallness, nuance, contradiction. It's a realm that by definition cannot be easily distilled.
Most anywhere you look, lines have been drawn separating the way our institutions and services are funded in this country, which gives us public schools versus private schools, public prisons or private ones, publicly funded art versus private art. Yet across a more conceptual sense of public and private, the lines grow hazy. Sometimes public art feels, to me, less like the Henry Moore sculpture gracing a downtown plaza, than art that is made for a wide audience, like the Hollywood blockbuster: a generalized, nonspecific mainstream product designed to produce larger-than-life spectacle. In this sense, independent films become like a "private" cinema—more ordinary, more unpredictable, more true...well, a different kind of true. And, finally, when we step fully into the behavioral side of public and private, the lines are being etched and erased and re-etched and re-erased everyday. It's confusing. Walking down the street and talking on your cell phone could be a public or private experience, depending on the street, the conversation, the time of day.
Obviously it's not a question of either-or. Both are vital to the culture. Beyond the fact that the divide between public and private underlies many issues today, that divide also serves as a metaphor for the tension inherent in democracy itself. Where do my obligations to myself intersect with my obligations to others? It's a question of how they relate, and whether we are better off in a world in which the public and private have basically fused, or whether we need to find a way to keep them more discreet.
The Public and Private Society
Until this past year, most of the conversation on public and private issues in American society have centered on privacy. Technology has come to represent, among other things, a threat to our privacy, because more and more of our information is vulnerable to interception and manipulation in cyberspace. Our Social Security numbers, bank accounts, credit cards are all up for grabs; our hard drives are all susceptible to attack. Identity theft is a constant fear, and well it should be. In 2004 the Federal Trade Commission received more than 635,000 consumer fraud and identity theft complaints. Consumers reported losses from fraud of more than $547 million. In an age of information it's not surprising that our identities become more and more bound up with information, a series of numbers that we come to believe represents our identity and therefore should remain private, in our control.
And so we have, among other things, the 20-foot rule at the ATM, where you have to give the person in front of you plenty of space. We have the Password Lookaway Rule, wherein you turn around for a second while a friend enters their password on their computer—it's as if they were undressing. And in our casinos here, there is a particular variant of this rule. It's the No Eye Contact With People Playing the Slots rule. There's a certain kind of person you'll see on the slots—older, a little weathered, probably someone with too much time to kill—and if you so much as glance at their machine they will give you a look of such withering hostility you will assume the screen displays all their most vital information.
Surveillance cameras, too, give new meaning to all the world being a stage. An essential element of the public realm is performance. But it's that the cameras may catch those moments in between knowing performance, the nose-pick, the crotch-grab. Then there's the Patriot Act, whose provisions that grant federal law enforcement wide latitude in hunting down suspected terrorists are up for reauthorization this year. The act represents a similar challenge to what we instinctively feel is the safety of our private selves—that cluster of spaces, opinions, relationships, actions and information we believe should be sacrosanct.
And yet, it seems as if it's the "public" that is really under assault. It's an age of declining public schools and expanding private prisons. Public institutions are clamoring to outsource services to private companies, to conduct themselves with the leanness of private enterprises. It seems more and more we've come to accept that private represents all that is efficient, effective and good. The public is slow and cumbersome and unreliable. The public is a burden: taxes, welfare, pork-barrel spending. The private is the crisp, if cold, certainty of the bottom line, cherished property rights, sensible NIMBYism in the wake of out-of-control eminent domain.
When the public makes an unexpected push back, it feels like big news. Witness the city of Philadelphia, whose government made headlines late last year when it proposed to blanket the entire city with a municipal wi-fi network to provide cheap broadband Internet service to all its citizens, particularly the poorest. Telecom powerhouse Verizon balked and tried to block the move in court. The Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law barring cities in that state from operating networks, though Philadelphia will be grandfathered in if it can get its network up and running by the end of the year. Now this debate is spilling over into other communities, many of them rural. In Congress, two rival bills have been introduced, one blocking municipalities from offering broadband, the other allowing it.
But concerns about privacy no longer are the only issue on the agenda. President Bush has pressed this year for the privatization of Social Security, in a bid to create what he calls an Ownership Society. Thus far Americans don't seem to be biting—a recent CBS News poll finds that a majority of Americans are not crazy about privatizing Social Security. But whether that's dissatisfaction with the idea itself or merely the president's version of the idea is unclear. Clearly it is significant that the debate is being held at all—the terms of the debate itself have passed into the public sphere.
Both sides press the ideological case. The Cato Institute thinks privatization is great. "Widespread ownership of capital assets has many benefits for society," writer David Boaz proclaims. "It means that property is better-maintained and long-term values are higher, including environmental quality. It means that people have a greater stake in their community and thus become better citizens. It protects people from the arbitrary power of government and gives them more freedom and more confidence as citizens. It produces prosperity because markets can't work without private property."
Writer Wayne O'Leary of the Progressive Populist, "a newspaper that believes people are more important than corporations," provides a nice counter-argument. "Beyond the president's bracing about the 'dignity of economic independence,' 'the challenges of life in a free society' or 'making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny' lay a deeper and more hard-edged meaning: Americans were, and are, being asked to return to some semblance of the law of the jungle—to voluntarily embrace an updated version of the world of social Darwinism that existed in the 19th and early-20th centuries, when it was, quite literally, every man for himself."
Liberals and conservatives both are trying to find a rhetorical foundation on which to build their arguments, by tagging the other side as opposing freedom. For liberals, an overemphasis on the private at the expense of the public means that the poor and the disenfranchised are cut off from the society—benefits of privatization helping the wealthy become wealthier. For conservatives, the compromises of the public realm—the taxes that must be collected, the rules that impinge from all corners—constrict the freedoms of regular people to live their lives, and thus privatization means empowerment for a large cross section of Americans.
For proponents of the Ownership Society, ownership is the linchpin of engagement with the outside world. Conservatives, a generally more pragmatic lot than liberals, contend that ownership is what makes people feel like they're a part of their community. Essentially the line is that the best public goods are private goods. The best public institution, truly belonging to the people, is not an out-of-touch government, slow and corrupt and inefficient, but an unregulated and responsive free market. We have a vested interest when we own things.
And yet ownership can carry its own negation. The more we become self-sufficient, the more we own, the less we owe. If we pay for our own health care, our own education, our own retirement, we do not owe the society anything for providing it. Further, the more we own, the easier it becomes to create a culture of defensiveness, even fear. We take care of the things we own, by and large, and that's a good thing, yet the more we acquire, the more determined we are not to lose it.
The Public and Private Space
When Wynn Las Vegas opened a few months ago, I went for a visit and walked into a beautiful indoor French garden. The room was light and open to the outdoors; a clean breeze passed through. My whole body exhaled in a wave of buoyant pleasure. The difference between public space and private space is just that. Private space is like taking off a very heavy coat and shrinking, sinking into a sofa, a tub, a bed. Everything becomes more inner-focused, smaller, more serene. Public spaces make the soul expansive. It's not a curling in but an unfolding out, chest out and arms outstretched.
Here in Las Vegas, more so than in many places, private spaces have the nasty habit of masquerading as public spaces. Just as I was settling into the garden, an usher, or a clerk, or a bellboy—I don't even know who he was, this minion of the Wynn Empire—told me the atrium was private space, off limits to me. And just like that an intense anger rose up in me as he pointed to the exit. Private space is great if you have the hookup, not so great if you don't.
Of course, one could argue, since so much of Las Vegas' biggest private spaces, the casinos, are open enough, who cares? I mean, free and abundant parking and 24-hour accessibility are mostly good enough, right? What do we really do in public space anymore, anyway? Just need a park for the kids to play some soccer. Private spaces are always hammering us into our roles as buyers and sellers. Hurry up. Keep moving. Do you need a receipt? And most of us accept the pace of the modern world, even embrace it. After all, when we need to slow down, there's always the back yard. Or rush hour.
As our cities have developed into suburbs, the nature of public space has changed, shrunk and multiplied, become more private. The allure of the suburbs, the whole point of the suburbs, it seems, is to give each person, each family, more space to control. Houses are larger, so it's easier to create more definable spaces inside—private spaces for the parents (and sometimes, with sitting rooms, even the parents can carve a bit of private space from each other), private spaces for the kids, large public spaces like great rooms and family rooms for entertaining. And of course, the restorative green lung of the 19th-century city park has been partially replaced by the back yard. Conservatives who bitch (somewhat myopically) about the intrusions of public planning do have a point when they say that spaces don't make communities, people do. Private space is space that is controlled. It is the space of thresholds. There are degrees of private space, especially vis a vis our relationship with other people. This is no more apparent than in courtship. With every threshold passed, every door entered, the new space becomes more and more intimate. The neighborhood. The gated apartment complex. The front door. The bedroom. Even bodies themselves have their dimensions of ever more private spaces. As such it is negotiable space, space we use to separate friends from strangers, friends from lovers.
Still, I think the left has the better vision, the equality of a public space that insists that everyone can come, should come and must come if the space, and the society, is to have any deep value. The public realm is the one place where we can articulate our faith in each other. The public space is also about engagement, but its engagements are larger, broader. Public space engages us with nature, or with our society, or for the chance encounter with a complete stranger. Ironically, part of what makes them grand is the satisfying feeling that we own a tiny bit of them. We are willing to share, to allow everyone their "private" experience of a great public space if we can have ours— that place where there are no signs warning us off, no chains blocking the trailways, no towering guards to bark us back a step. One of the pleasures of the public space is the discovery of that moment when we make it ours, and the satisfaction that public space can both belong to us and belong to others.
As in other spheres, the line between public and private space grows ever cloudier. Many spaces are privately owned but essentially act as public spaces. I don't much like the idea of, say, a large private park with turnstiles at every entrance; yet one of the great public spaces in the U.S. must surely be the Getty Center in Los Angeles. An art-museum complex atop a hill that overlooks the city's 405 Freeway, the Getty offers spectacular views that encompass the Los Angeles basin, from downtown to the Pacific Ocean. In the plazas and gardens that surround the campus of travertine buildings and bind them together, visitors feel exalted, larger than life, able to dream. Frankly, the art itself is almost superfluous. For the nominal price of parking, this is a fair trade-off.
In Chicago, meanwhile, there is an interesting dynamic in the city's new Millennium Park, a showcase of art and architecture, gardens and performance venues built over rail yards. Financed with public and private money, it's a city park that carries the names of prominent corporate sponsors who made donations. Fair enough, I suppose, that Frank Gehry's snaking steel bridge is named for BP, or that Boeing, headquartered in Chicago, has its name on a series of galleries. We can imagine some future where a single park bench will be brought to you by some company or other —may even be festooned with a synergistic ad that you must read before you're allowed to sit down. Or, who knows, maybe a view of a statue will be sponsored by Kodak or something.
Don't laugh—at Millennium earlier this year there was a flap about whether visitors could photograph a 110-ton mirrored sculpture called Cloud Gate. Did the sculpture belong to the people, or did it belong to the sculptor? Eventually the matter was resolved and photographers can now shoot it free. But one imagines these kinds of dilemmas will appear more frequently.
Our best public space in Las Vegas is the fountains of Bellagio, the most spectacular place on the Strip, the most romantic, the most relaxing. Predictably, it's a bit of an illusion. For one, it's not publicly owned. Just try to stage some demonstration or rally, see how well you fare. And also, there are no benches around the perimeter of Bellagio's lake—which would really make the area a perfect de facto public space. Benches suggest that a place is an end in itself, not merely a means to an end, a passage through from one thing to another. Still, if the casino is not exactly encouraging people to stop, to sit down and stay awhile, the wide, stately sidewalk does encourage us to slow down. Suddenly, just staring at the lake or the tower itself, or the Eiffel Tower across the street become ends in themselves. The fountains at Bellagio transcend the superficial glitz of the city and break through to something really wonderful.
This is why the mountain at the new Wynn Las Vegas resort is such a disappointment. The whole exclusivity of the project is out of place for such a tourist-heavy area. Wynn fronts the street with a giant man-made mountain, cordoned off with fences. The sidewalk is narrow. Steve Wynn talked so much about the experience of being on the inside of his new casino, but he's made the public-like spaces inside just a little too onerous to find.
As Las Vegas develops its 61 empty Downtown acres, let us have our ballpark, or our performing-arts place, our lofts or offices, or stores or (sigh) our parking garages. But let us find someplace for a public park. Size is not the issue. Quality is the issue. Vision is the issue.
The Public and Private Face
I've spent most of my life in driving cities, where private space dominates. One of the biggest adjustments to living in New York, where the subway is king, was getting used to having a conversation on the subway. The subway was a resolutely public space—all sorts of proselytizers, musicians, homeless people made their presence known —but it was clear that the majority of New Yorkers rode it with resolutely private stares that said, "Don't bother me!" Eye contact was rare; the best you might get was the 45-degree glance: a slight head-shift in your general direction. I probably kept the fresh-scrubbed look of the newcomer, but somehow I couldn't have a conversation of any depth with a friend. Too revealing in such tight quarters.
Similarly, whenever I walk out of a movie theater with a friend and they ask me, "What did you think?" a paranoia wells up in me. It is my private face, ornery, shy, not wanting to reveal itself. "I'll tell you outside," I say. It is not so much that I think my opinion on the movie is so profound—quite the contrary, usually I am wracked by shame for the modesty of my thinking—but somehow the opinion is deeply revealing of my dreams and fears, hopes and limitations, and so it's not fitting for public space, where lots of potential eavesdroppers are walking past.
We all locate the public and private differently. For all of us there is a line dividing what we are prepared to share with anyone and what we keep only for the people we love or trust, or those secrets that we finally keep only to ourselves (and, yes, even from ourselves). So, while I tend not to lose much sleep about credit-card fraud or identity theft, I do tense up whenever I'm asked to state an opinion about the arts, and strangers are lingering nearby.
Still, we often want to share our private selves in the public world. This is not quite the same as going to a show or a ballgame. There the cheering and booing is resolutely public. The point is not to stand out and assert difference but to blend in and connect to other people, something larger than yourself. It is to be part of the crowd. Yet there are moments when we'd rather play to the crowd, some crowd, any crowd. If you have a spat with a lover on the phone, you talk quietly, try to push the conversation back to later, when you're safe at home. If you're saying something particularly romantic, alluring, sexy, you may say it with a little extra oomph, a little pop, so that you may be overhead. Eavesdrop on a conversation at the supermarket, or the airport, or the theater, for 10 or 15 minutes—and how can you not with people braying so enthusiastically into their phones?—and you'll know them as well as your own family.
The public face wants an audience, the private one does not. But to get an audience, we often take private information and share it with everybody. Which means Warhol's 15 minutes are probably closer to an hour. Privacy may be on the decline in the world of digital theft and surveillance cameras, where everybody seems to be asking for your Social Security number. ("Dude, you're a video- store clerk—why do you need to know?") And yet, we are flaunting our private selves with ever more regularity, and with less discretion. We are talking on cell phones in public places where we may be overheard. We play our music loud in cars, as much to show our taste to others as anything else. Girls go wild or badly misbehavior. Now guys go wild, too. More and more of us flaunt our private selves on reality shows—doesn't everybody now know at least one person who's been on a reality show? And don't we feel like we know them, that even if they are in some way "performing" that they are performing, basically, a version of who they really are?
On the airplane ride back from New Jersey this weekend, I watched a Surreal Life marathon on DirecTV. This is the show that throws seven former famous people into a house ... where things stop getting nice and start getting ... oh, wait, wrong show, but same idea. And oh the sights! Twenty-two-year-old model Adrianne Curry got famous for winning America's Top Model (another reality show), and now she's in love or lust or something with Christopher Knight, the former Peter Brady, who looks uncomfortably buff yet still seems to be about 15 years old. Rap star Da Brat earns a reputation for being brutally honest, yet she never seems to come clean on admitting that she's a complete loser who's making time on this crazy show. Verne Troyer, the Mini Me of the Austin Powers movies, gets spanked by strippers a lot. It's all very amusing, and yet eventually the private lives of these characters become something of a joke. What does private even mean when cameras are flashing all the time? But the thing is, this phenomenon not only threatens to ruin our notions of privacy—where those sorts of juicy details must be "earned"—but it also threatens to undermine the dignity of the public realm as well.
More behavior has crossed the realm from private to public. As a society, we are perhaps less ashamed of our bodies, of pleasure, of asserting our individuality, than past generations. A blow for freedom and against repression and shame! Yes, maybe. Sometimes the public realm needs a washing off by the private—the on-the-edge lyrics of a controversial artist, or a random and amusing drunken spectacle. Shock happens when private sensibilities and experiences intrude upon the public realm. That's why we need the occasional flasher, or Bible-thumping madman, or eccentric—I once saw a man walking down the street with a boa constrictor wrapped around his body and a parakeet perching on his shoulder. It's usually a dynamic shot of adrenaline into the body politic, but beware—the more widely the public draws its lines, the more permissive it becomes, the more static that transforming energy can become, and there are less places from which new dynamism can be drawn.
Mystery is the spice of life, and mystery is, must be, a private experience. The publicizing of the private body—think thongs, insane amounts of cleavage and neathage —is leaving nothing to the imagination. It's like, as private personas intrude in public places, the idea of having imagination is actually denigrated. Already the public realm is about compromise. We inevitably give up a degree of nuance to be heard or understood by others. We iron out some of our wrinkles. So even though we think we are presenting a wild, crazy persona to the world, it's still somewhat abstracted. I liken this sensation to moments of what I call too-honest honesty—at some point the baring of everything no longer seems laudable and sincere, but overwrought, manipulative, almost vulgar.
(And can I digress for a moment to cry foul at the entire idea of the nudist beach? I mean, a place where the body is intentionally de-eroticized, made completely passé and ordinary, a place where the naked body becomes acceptable and public, but arousal at such a body—admittedly difficult given most of the bodies at these places —becomes tacky and crude? What sort of madness is this?)
What has happened as we blur the line between public and private is that we risk losing the ability to find things authentically private, something that surprises us, nurtures us, something that doesn't have to packaged. We also lose the advantage of conduct in the public realm. We tend to think of our public persona as a façade, a mask that hides our real feelings. It can certainly be this. Yet the public persona also allows us to find a way to channel some of our private nature into a mode that is cordial and civil, desirous of exchange and debate, humane and decent. That's a mode that can be, should be, as authentic and true as the messy moments of our private lives.
Our public sides deal in symbol, abstraction, representation. It has to if it's going to affect or bind or spur the masses. After all, humanity is itself an abstraction. The public is the noble side, our best side—necessarily something we aspire toward more than we achieve. The private is all the rest of us.