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• Painting,
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A Sceptics View of Public Art

The problem with Public Art projects is that the Public part of them is instigated on behalf of the Public by councils, governing bodies and developers seeking to gain a contract. Non of these people have any interest or idea about art save for some misguided and outdated view that it should look like the ‘Angel of the North’.

They will put a vast amount of their Public Art budget into feasibility studying and administrating a piece of work based on what someone has seen on holiday in Spain, at best but more likely from a quick flick through the internet pages, with the only reasoning for the commission that someone else has one and five years ago it was a controversial art work.

That or they will occasionally pay reasonable money out to artists (God forbid that artists actually get paid for art) to run workshops and demonstrations of different artistic disciplines whereby the artist can draw upon their vast experience, knowledge and qualification to show small children how to turn a paper plate into a mask resembling a cat / upset plate of spaghetti bolognaise.

While it is true that some artists can make a living making Public Art it is not usually artistically challenging enough to be called Art but more monument or bird toilet, Aside from the money most artists would stay clear of selling themselves into corporate totalitarianism and stay in the safe haven of prostitution to the curb crawling art galleries. However some good has come out of Public Art. Leonardo would not have painted the Sistine Chapel without funding from the Church.

But that was when even the public had some appreciation and understanding of the art of the day. Art has moved on as Art must and always has, exploring new ideas and philosophies and impacting on the formation of the general wellbeing of culture and society. Unfortunately the contemporary art viewer can still only appreciate Old Leon, with perhaps some Rothko and Miro thrown in, and contemporary art to the mass populous is Jack Vittriano and David Shepard.

Art, as any art student will confirm, cannot be measured it can only be understood then liked or disliked on a personal basis. It is because there is a general lack of understanding of art that Public Art Budgets are wasted on quantifiable things such as administration, management and planning studies. It is a symptom of the sickness we call postmodernist that art has to be qualified by historical president giving some tangible justification to the philistine that art has a worth.

I wish I could remember the name of the bizarre French film I saw some years ago that allowed the character of an artist the line of, in translation,

“Artists have as much interest in art history as birds do in ornithology”

Artists make things in response to now, not then and hopefully by the time the Public have got it, art has again moved on. The current system of Public Art funding only serves to inhibit art in general. At best the system takes a number of would be bureaucrats off the dole queue but generally keeps artists in poverty