Art and the Public Space

Abstract

Public and artistic practices in the public area have been the object of a lot of research: most of the time, the studies are concerned with interventions or actions which dispute the established institutional order or at least try to disturb its obviousness (e.g. urban guerrilla). These sometimes spectacular interventions have focused the public attention on them, at the expense of other events that rather correspond to Dewey’s program: namely understanding the public area as a shared social space, in search of »popular esteem«. Involving various registers of artistic expression, numerous interventions in the public place blur the frontiers between the different spaces (art world, everyday life world). These practices offer innovative spaces of aesthetic experiments and draw new territories of shared creation.