The Benefits of Public Art
This symposium, held by the Public Art Forum in March 2000, looked at the benefits of public art beyond the narrow criteria of quality developed for art created for the gallery. Whilst a degree of consensus has evolved in recent years over the issue of good practice in public art, the lack of consensus over quality has strengthened the call for justification. This symposium looked at benefits to the audience (the community for which the work is made or in which it is placed), the clients (usually local authority) in meeting their success criteria and other more generalised benefits to society.
The report of the day identifies positive, practical and significant benefits for audience, commissioners and society at large, but also reveals that mechanisms for gathering and feeding back evaluative material are still not well developed nor used effectively. It looks at steps to improving how practice in this area and considers the role of decommissioning artworks and allowing for failure as well as success.
Follow this link to download the Full Report as a Rich Text Format document: 112Kb
