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BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access January 18, 2019

Assessing the Intellectual Value of New Genre Public Art

  • Elisa Caldarola EMAIL logo
From the journal Open Philosophy

Abstract

Suzanne Lacy introduced the term ‘New Genre Public Art’ (NGPA) to refer to art practices that depart from those traditional of public art (such as installing works in parks and plazas) and focus instead on the direct engagement of artists with audiences to deal with pressing socio-political issues. In this paper, I argue that some works of NGPA should be valued for the intellectual value grounded in their artistic features, not dissimilarly to works of conceptual art. In developing my argument, I take distance from Vid Simoniti’s recent account of ‘Socially Engaged Art’, offer a thorough analysis of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002) and Kathrin Bohm’s and Stefan Saffer’s Mobile Porch (1999), and submit that both such works qualify as good works of NGPA.

References

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Received: 2018-11-01
Accepted: 2018-11-08
Published Online: 2019-01-18

© by Elisa Caldarola, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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