04.11.2024
David Harding, Arte pubblica – Contentious term and contested practice
This is the lead chapter in a book of essays entitled, DECADEnt – Public Art – Contentious Term and Contested Practice, 1996.
The term ‘public art’ has become widely used in the last thirty-odd years to describe a certain art practice, the results of which are to be found mainly in external urban spaces used freely by the general public. To put it another way, public art is found in the streets, squares, parks and ‘nooks and crannies’ of towns and cities. The term is used to embrace, among other things, the notion of a general publicness of ‘location’, as distinct from, the more limited publicness of institutions such as art galleries and contemporary art museums. However the location, where an artwork is to be found, is not the limit of what the term attempts to define. In moving art out of the gallery and museum it often occupies non-art-specific, unregulated public open space and engages the attention of vastly increased and diverse publics. As Janet Kardon has said, “Public art is the major arena in which democratic ideas and aesthetic elitism attempt to come to terms with each other.” It is these issues that public art practices attempt to address.
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