Public Art: Love It, Love It Not
By Amy Williams
In March, a 12-year-old boy stuck his gum on a $1.5 million dollar painting by Helen Frankenthaler at the Detroit Institute of Art. Possibly starting his career as an art critic early, he learned the cost of bad reviews… and got expelled from his school. But he was 12 you know. Yet what of adults who defame and destroy art?
The recent thievery of my installation art piece, The Yellow Clothesline, in front of Taylor Books on Capitol Street, got me into investigating art terrorists. Thankfully, after some interesting twists of fate, part of my clothesline got returned to Taylor’s a few days after it was stolen. The man who turned it into Angie Mullins said he “found it in the alley.”
This is one of the challenges of public art… sometimes the public doesn’t like it. A recent NPR radio show on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project of placing fabric panels over areas of the Arizona River area of central Colorado highlighted the regular controversy that surrounds the couple’s efforts to put installation art on public view. According to the interview about the project “Over the River,”: “The artists say the social debate is an essential part of every project they do… “ But many people are very protective of the natural, rural qualities that attracted the couple to the area in the first place. Check out www.npr.org and type in “christo art.”
In the summer of 2004, Swedish graffiti artists kidnapped a fiber-glass cow from the international street art exhibit “CowParade.” Demanding the cow sculptures be declared “non-art,the artists executed the cow. The group held the cow hostage for three weeks, with demands that the 100-plus other cows be removed from the streets. E-mail video coverage sent to a paper showed the cow flanked by two masked, black figures with power drills. Later the cow was sent back to CowParade officials, cut in pieces in a bag.
One of the reasons I love public art is because it takes art to the street. The NPR story quoted Katy Siegel, a public art scholar and associate professor of art history at New York’s Hunter College. She says Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work is important because it engages millions of people who don’t visit galleries or museums. “It’s good to be talking about these things,” she says. “What is public? What’s in the public interest? How do we use public space?”
What do you think?
