The Detail Most Visitors Miss at Spoonbridge and Cherry

Thousands of people photograph Spoonbridge and Cherry every week, and most miss the detail that makes it work. The sculpture is a fountain: water sprays from the tip and the base of the cherry's stem, the latter intended to keep the fruit gleaming in the light. From the spot where visitors stop for the standard photo, the mist is invisible. Up close, it changes the whole object.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen completed the work in 1988 for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, funded by a $500,000 gift from collector Frederick R. Weisman. The spoon weighs about 5,800 pounds and the cherry roughly 1,200 pounds, and the pair are set over a pond shaped like a linden seed, echoing the lindens around the garden. Van Bruggen contributed the cherry, drawing on the formality of the garden, the gardens at Versailles and the dining etiquette of Louis XIV's court.

The water feature is one expression of the care that has kept the piece from wearing thin over nearly four decades. A sculpture that was only a clever shape would have aged into mere scenery; one that mists its own cherry rewards the person who walks up to the pond on a still day. For neighbors who pass it constantly, the spray is a standing invitation to look harder at the rest of the garden, where the quieter sculptures almost certainly hold details of their own.