In the summer of 2021 I spent a week in NYC and visited this sculpture just by chance as it was down the street from my hotel and was near MSG. They were having a big event and the entrance was closed, which I thought at the time was due to the event, only now am I discovering the actual reason.
While I understand the premise of restricting access to mitigate suicides, this seems to be a solution to a symptom and mostly a public perception stop gap. This does not prevent suicide to any significant degree.
If a structure is built for recreation, as a kind of thought exercise, and novel touristic destination and then it’s used as a tool of self destruction by a few people suffering from mental illness, maybe the actual solution is to stop investing in constructing “art” pieces and start investing in solving why someone would want to jump off your sculpture to begin with. After all art is a societies expression of success when all other necessary needs are met, otherwise your art is exploitation.
Capitalism or more accurately Neoliberalism is only successful due to competitive free markets, which encourages the ruthless pursuit of wealth extraction and resource acquisition.
It is not possible to succeed in “capitalism” without harming others, as you are required to extract the labor or value from those who are disadvantaged in order to enrich oneself. So in other words you convince the working class through persuasion to give you more than you give them.
This by definition is mental illness. Mental illness being thoughts or behaviors that harms oneself or others.
The fact that this isn’t widely accepted will be what we look back on as barbarism, much like we look back at history and wonder how those of the past could live such ways.