Nobody I know really likes them, those four artificial waterfalls lining the Brooklyn side of upper New York Harbor. They’re the summer art blockbuster that fizzled. “Underwhelming,” one friend pronounced. “They don’t stand up to the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge, let alone the whole city,” an acquaintance elaborated. “I don’t know — they just don’t do much for me,” seems to be the universal line.

So for a couple of months I’ve been meaning to write this, a modest apologia for this delightful work.

Asking someone to reevaluate a work of art can’t rely on first principles, as Wittgenstein pointed out. Rather, you have to show them various aspects of the work — Stand here. Consider this. Have you thought about this context? — and hope they come around. So, a scattershot presentation:

Olafur Eliasson’s work makes bare the device, and the New York City Waterfalls are no exception. The four waterfalls are built of bare scaffolding, 90 to 120 feet high. Pumps suck water from the East River and the harbor, lifting more than 132 metric tons per minute (291,500 pounds; probably more, depending on water temperature and salinity) and sending it cascading off a trough into thin air.

The four waterfalls are a study in uselessness, but that alone doesn’t distinguish them from other works of art, which are always just as useless. More specifically, though, the waterfalls enact an endless futility, expending tremendous energy to put water right back where it started.

The futility can be seen as heroic, even poetic, though. Eliasson has also made reverse waterfalls like this one shown recently at PS-1 in Queens (photo by Flickr user somethingstartedcrazy):

The reverse waterfall makes one of the key concerns of the NYC Waterfalls more explicit: It is a machine, a contraption, that attempts to reverse gravity — that most paradigmatic of physical laws. Yet it does so fully within the realm of the physical, the visibly physical, pumps and hoses and all.

Another angle: When I was a kid, I’d daydream for hours about what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared from the landscape we’d created. How long would it take for the pavement to crack and the buildings to crumble? Would our dogs and cats survive as feral scavengers? Would rivers burst their dams and carve new courses? I’m obviously not the only kid with such daydreams, as Alan Weisman’s bestselling The World Without Us shows.

And of course, David Byrne:

This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies

“Waterfalls” is the tenth word in that song, and even though I tend not to listen to lyrics, it’s what came to mind the first time I saw the Waterfalls, walking down Peck Slip one evening on my way to Fresh Salt. The widest of the waterfalls came into view, framed against the base of the Brooklyn-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking for all the world like a primeval spring bursting forth from the stone. I couldn’t help but start grinning. What if Long Island were abandoned and the infrastructure, neglected by its former masters, sprung a leak?

Making the familiar strange is one of the tasks of any site-specific installation, and the waterfalls accomplish this on several levels. They take the form, if you squint, of four real waterfalls, natural geographic features. They have real interactions with the environment, taking water from the estuary, sending it cascading through the air such that some evaporates (to fall to earth later, somewhere else, as precipitation) and the rest returns slightly cooler to its source. They replicate the water cycle in miniature and with clear human intervention.

The waterfalls even have unintended interactions with their environment. Recently their hours of operation have been curtailed because the saltwater mist is corroding some structures in Brooklyn Heights, according to complaints.

Conceptually, then, the waterfalls blend the natural and the unnatural, the everyday and the extraordinary.

But they’re also just fun to look at. They get the most “eyeballs,” I’d guess, from commuters going over the Manhattan Bridge like I do twice a day. This isn’t the best way to see them, since looking down on them really does diminish them visually compared to the much taller buildings and bridges that surround them. The best place I’ve found to see them is the jogging trail along the East River on the Manhattan side. At night, the waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge is backlit. You walk along, smell the sea, watch the tugboats and water taxis, and experience the waterfalls as a temporary part of the harbor’s landscape. They’re even all visible together from a few points, although it’s also enough to look at one or two and just know the others are there.

Water, springing from nowhere, as if something has gone wrong with some pipes or other. Or as if the processes of geology have gone haywire to create these monstrous things. The longer you look at them, the stranger they seem, and the more permeable become the boundaries of nature and artifice. That’s some trick to pull off in this overbuilt city perched precariously next to an untamed ocean.