Reading
How not to Commission by Ray McKenzie on the PAR+RS web site.
Well articulated challenge to assumptions about public art, both against works which are simply corporate posturing, regeneration ‘place-making’, or artist’s ego, and also against the overblown claims of socially engaged art.
McKenzie makes use of Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, but I wish he had also taken into account Grant Kester’s work, a more nuanced and subtle argument. In the end the projects he discusses are compelling, and I am persuaded by his argument that the 19th Century monuments in our cities are not so far away from some contemporary public art, being focal points for community activism, celebration and memory.
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