Public Art

Paper Summary:

As long as there has been art there has been public art. But this does not mean that public art has always meant the same thing to the people who made it or the community that it was made for. This paper examines four moments in history and four specific artworks as a way of examining how the function of art in public places has changed, as well as the ways in which it has not changed, over the centuries. This paper begins at a moment long before many people would place the beginnings of public art with the Paleolithic drawings on the walls in French caves and ends with the works of Maya Lin. As each moment in time presents a different form of public art, no single, overriding definition of the term is offered here. Rather, each moment in history and each example of art requires its own definition of public art.

From the Paper:

"Some nineteenth-century scholars argued that the cave paintings should be seen as attempts to influence reality, that the images painted on cave walls (and this would perhaps have been especially true of the portrayals of animals) had a totemistic value. In other words, people painted animals to help hunters have better luck in the hunt, either in terms of capturing prey or in terms of surviving the hunt without injury. In a similar vein, other important types of Paleolithic that seem to celebrate female fertility, such as the Venus of Wallendorf, might have been used as totems that would help to ensure the continuing existence of the tribe itself."

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