Public Artopia: Art in Public Space in Question

Abstract

This doctoral thesis provides further insight into the interrelationships between artwork, public space and beholder. Public art has been a burgeoning phenomenon across cities in the Western world since the late 1940s. Various claims have been produced about what public art ‘does’ to people in certain places and times. Perceived relationships between art and space may be connected with physical-aesthetic, economic, social and cultural-symbolic aspects of urban life. Public-art claims mainly originate from those who produce public artworks and those who are involved in public art’s enabling institutional and cultural policy contexts. Until now, public art has hardly been problematised from a geographical perspective. On top of that, little is known about the relationships between art and public space through particularly the perspectives of public art’s publics. This work explicitly includes both a geographical perspective and publics’ experiences of public art