—An Inquiry into the Cult of Consensus, the Tyranny of Uplift, and the Crisis of Site
by Mallory Finch
To say that public art is terrible is to say something both glib and frequently, unfortunately, true. From soulless fibreglass mascots to solemn abstracts that resemble half-melted plumbing, the landscape of contemporary public art is a wilderness of good intentions gone badly awry. The tragedy is not just aesthetic, but civic: when art in public space fails, it doesn’t merely disappoint—it erodes public trust in art itself.
This series examines why public art has become synonymous with the uninspired, the opaque, and the pointlessly grand. We begin with the underlying conditions of production, the mechanisms of funding and selection that ensure mediocrity by design.
I. The Committee, or: How to Kill a Vision
The first suspect in the murder of meaningful public art is the selection process itself, often conducted by committee: a plural body in which taste is diluted, ambition rounded off, and anything remotely dangerous filtered out by phrases like “may not be appropriate for all audiences.” In her 1989 essay “The Tyranny of the Public,” critic Rosalind Krauss warned against the increasing bureaucratisation of public art, noting that “an art that must answer to all cannot answer to anything in particular.”
In most cases, public art emerges from a kind of institutional choreography: a brief is issued (typically full of words like “engagement,” “dialogue,” and “diversity”), artists submit proposals, and a panel of local officials, curators, business reps, and occasionally a poet, vote on which proposal seems safest. “Risk” becomes a liability. “Innovation” means combining steel and glass in a new, even more forgettable way.
As Claire Bishop argues in Artificial Hells (2012), the rise of participatory art in public contexts has led to an “ethical turn” in which morality trumps aesthetics. The work must be “good for people,” which often means it must be legible, polite, and impossible to hate—and therefore, impossible to love.
II. The Cult of Uplift
A related pathology is what we might call the Cult of Uplift. Public art is almost always required to be inspirational, as though the presence of art in shared space must be morally improving. This compulsion toward civic optimism—what critic Jennifer Friedlander calls “sentimental public culture”—leads to art that operates in clichés: soaring birds, spiralling forms, human figures releasing doves, ascending ladders, or simply standing with arms outstretched like tired statues of “hope.”
In reality, art’s greatest public function is not to uplift, but to complicate. A truly public art should be allowed to disturb, confront, grieve, or ridicule. Consider Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.—vilified at first, now revered precisely because it dared to be elegiac instead of heroic. It was not about uplift. It was about truth.
The problem today is that such courage is rarely permitted. The artwork must be “positive” and “inclusive,” usually without ever asking what those words mean. And so we get vague symbolism—rings, loops, hands holding hands—designed to mean everything, and thus nothing.
III. Art for Whom?
Perhaps the deepest question is for whom is public art made?
Ostensibly, the answer is “the public.” But as sociologist Sharon Zukin observes in The Cultures of Cities (1995), public art increasingly serves the interests of developers, branding campaigns, and urban placemaking strategies. What was once a gesture of civic identity is now often a piece of visual furniture deployed to make gentrification look benevolent. A neon slogan, a colourful mural, a mildly interactive sculpture—designed not to provoke, but to Instagram well.
Meanwhile, the actual “public”—in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess—is rarely invited into the conversation. And when they do engage, their voices are often reduced to consultation surveys, box-ticked outreach, or, in some cases, local outrage that the sculpture looks “nothing like a duck.”
To Be Continued
This is not a condemnation of public art per se. At its best, public art can be monumental without being pompous, intimate without being minor, disruptive without being destructive. It can remind us of history, confront us with injustice, or simply stop us in our tracks.
But to do so, it must be allowed to risk failure, to speak in its own voice, and to mean something real, even if that meaning is difficult or uncomfortable.
In Part II, we will look at the successful exceptions, the artists who have resisted the machinery of mediocrity, and what their work tells us about the possibility—and the future—of art in public space.