Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy

Fred Evans

Fred Evans

Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy

An Essay in Political Aesthetics

In: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

Columbia University Press | 2018

https://doi.org/10.7312/evan18758

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Contents

About this book

Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.

Author information

Fred Evans is professor of philosophy and coordinator for the Center of Interpretative and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is the author of Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (1993) and The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (Columbia, 2009) and coeditor of Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (2000).

Reviews

Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America:
In this thought-provoking book, Fred Evans asks which public artworks constitute acts of democratic citizenship and which serve autocratic tendencies, and proposes a philosophical criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. The field and subject of public art is in particular need of critically engaged analysis, and this book is particularly strong when Evans merges close visual and material observation of public art with close critical analysis.

Leonard Lawlor, author of From Violence to Speaking Out: Apocalypse and Expression in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze:
Combining stimulating commentaries on art with insightful analyses of contemporary philosophers, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a major contribution to the ongoing debates about the nature of democracy. In a way that is immensely compelling, Evans shows how works of public art might (or might not) qualify as acts of citizenship in democracy. Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a book I wish I had written.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, recipient of the Hiroshima Art Prize:
This book is a critically needed study in political aesthetics addressing complex connections between democracy, citizenship, and public art. Its systematic analysis and criticism of selected artistic projects, and ideas from such thinkers on democracy as Badiou, Derrida, Deutsche, Fraser, Lefort, Rancière, and Rawls, make this book an excellent companion to our intelligent thinking regarding the meaning and value of public art as 'acts of citizenship.'

Anish Kapoor, winner of the Turner Prize:
Professor Fred Evans’s closely argued book on the public object exposes the fragility of democratic discourse in its relation to image and monument. Democracy does not find a voice in public art but instead it is the public object that gives form and space to the symbolic imagination. Public art is not about the placing of a more or less beautiful object in a public space. It is instead, the struggle for space and object to find resonance with communal conversations of place and therefore the shared languages of togetherness and difference.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
CONTENTS Free access PDF PDF	vii
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Free access PDF PDF	ix
1. DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC ART Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
2. VOICES AND PLACES: THE SPACE OF PUBLIC ART AND WODICZKO’S THE HOMELESS PROJECTION Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	23
3. DEMOCRACY’S “EMPTY PLACE”: RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DERRIDA’S DEMOCRACY TO COME Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	48
4. PUBLIC ART’S “PLAIN TABLET”: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY ART Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	81
5. DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART: BADIOU AND RANCIÈRE Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	109
6. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CHICAGO’S MILLENNIUM PARK Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	153
7. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF NEW YORK’S NATIONAL 9/11 MEMORIAL Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	181
8. PUBLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CITIZENSHIP Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	231
Appendix: Badiou on “Being and the Void” Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	249
NOTES Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	255
BIBLIOGRAPHY Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	311
INDEX Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	327

Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy

An Essay in Political Aesthetics

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