Public Art and the Art of the Public -- After the Creative City
Date uploaded: March 14, 2012
Public Art and the Art of the Public -- After the Creative City
Jonathan Vickery, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Commissioned and published by ixia
Introduction:
This short study aims to assess the current situation of public art in the UK within an urban cultural policy context. In this context we look beyond the practices and strategies of particular artists, and consider the ‘public’ contexts that form and inform practice and set objectives for strategy. What political-policy conditions have formed the public realm in which public art has so developed in the last two decades? In the context of a further decade of recessionary economics, what questions must public art workers be asking? Is public art still on the fringes of mainstream contemporary art, or an independent sector of cultural practice forging its own public agenda?
About the Author:
Dr Jonathan Vickery is Associate Professor and an MA Program Director in the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK. He has been a Henry Moore post-doctoral fellow; a director of The Aesthesis Project and executive editorial board member of Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life; and reviews editor and regular contributor to Art & Architecture Journal and their weblog. He has published academic and art criticism on public art, urban regeneration, art and cultural theory, and is now working on two projects assessing the role of art in the public sphere.