Last week we talked a little bit about how art—and culture more broadly defined—gives a place its identity. What’s generally referred to as “public art” is one way to help shape that identity.
Both Dallas and Waco have used public art to portray their city as a place rooted in cowboy culture. Both cities have expansive trail drive sculptures right downtown, at the place, you could say, that represents the heart of the community. At least it makes historic sense in Waco. In many places, representational and narrative public art tends to be more popular. Or at least more acceptable. Often, you’ll see an attitude like “if we’re going to have public art it needs to be something whose message is unambiguous.” The Doris Miller Memorial along the Brazos counts as public art, too, although sometimes when you encounter a memorial, you don’t interact with it as art, per se. Its message is so unambiguous that it’s hard to see it as art at all. Sometimes the utility that we pursue gets in the way of our understanding the truth about certain things. That’s probably a topic we should talk about some other time.
Over the past 20 years or so, when you’ve heard talk in the United States about a town supporting public art, or local groups encouraging policies to benefit the arts, you usually heard the case being made that it was a good investment, as if the primary interest was in seeing a monetary return. This reflects the bottom-line mentality with which we approach everything from medicine to education. More recently, however, some people who study society have begun to look at public art not just in terms of how it can revive the economy of a place, but how it can help create things that are harder to measure with dollar signs.
A recent book examines ways that cities have shifted “the attention from the economic to the social impact that cultural and artistic initiatives may have in depressed urban settings.” The authors maintain that “culture-led regeneration can be understood, not only in terms of a physical and economic improvement of distressed urban areas, but also as a means to produce social cohesion.”
The organization Americans for the Arts works a lot with this issue and always tries to explain just how broadly we should understand the benefits of public art to be. It notes that public art matters because through it, cities gain “cultural, social, and economic value.” The group explains that art “reflects and reveals our society, adds meaning to our cities and uniqueness to our communities.” It’s a social investment. Now there’s also a caution there. You don’t want your public art to look like everyone else’s.
