Public art and happiness neil thin jan2018
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Short presentation to Edinburgh City Council/Edinburgh College of Art event on public art planning, 31st January 2018
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Public art and happiness neil thin jan2018
- 4. What’s Edinburgh’s most important piece of public art? Globally recognised Humble and accessible Tells stories Connects with history
- 5. How does Wikipedia represent Edinburgh’s public art?
- 6. Enough bronze men on horseback? By comparison the Norwegian war memorial seems inspirational
- 7. Graveyard art can be provocative
- 10. …or accidental
- 11. Some of public art’s fun comes from its susceptibility to ambush
- 19. Even functional transport art can pack a big punch.
- 20. Soviet bus stops (Christopher Herwig)
- 21. Transport-related art can entertain and save lives at the same time
- 22. Pothole gardening is cheap fun which reduces the danger of potholes
- 24. Nonfunctional art can add an extra wow to even the most beautiful locations
Editor's Notes
- Source: Action for Happiness/New Economics Foundation
- Greyfriars Bobby, by William Brodie 1972. Accessibility has been both a strength and a weakness, given that recently tourists have taken to rubbing the dog’s nose, causing concern about longterm damage. I’ll be focusing for now mainly on relatively ‘everyday’ forms of PA,those that haven’t achieved iconic status and which didn’t cost a fortune to commission. Partly this is because I feel that a lot of the most interesting diversity of PA is in fairly informal and cheap forms of citizen art. Partly it’s because most of the investment in evaluation of the benefits of PA is bound to go towards assessing those projects that cost the most, leading to the relatively neglect of humbler forms of PA which can nonetheless be evaluated in informal, commonsense ways.
- It’s predominantly grey stone art. Mausoleums and dead men on horseback have their place, but you can soon reach saturation point. After a while, a little dog statue – perhaps the Victorian equivalent of a skateboarding cat – can provide light relief. Public art is tedious or simply ignored if it becomes monotonous
- Mausoleums and dead men on horseback have their place, but you can soon reach saturation point. After a while, a little dog statue – perhaps the Victorian equivalent of a skateboarding cat – can provide light relief. The Norwegian Brigade War Memorial in West Princes Street Gardens. It says: "During the war years 1940-45 the Norwegian Brigade and other army units were raised and trained in Scotland. Here we found hospitality, friendship and hope during dark years of exile. In grateful memory of our friends and allies on these isles this stone was erected in the year 1978."
- Steve Jurvetson Fliickr CC
- This tank in Dresden has been ‘yarnbombed’ by ambush knitters
- ‘Fearless Girl’ by Kristen Visbal was installed on international women’s day 2016 facing the Charging Bull on Wall St. Caused controversy partly for appearing confrontational towards the male-dominated financial sector, but partly because the apparently feminist project was itself financed by a male-dominated advertising agency, hence was deemed insincere.
- Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North got shirt-bombed …. By the way, Gormley was explicit about his intentions for the AoN to have emotional impact: ‘I want to make something we can live with and that becomes a reservoir for feelings – feelings that perhaps we hadn’t known until this thing was there, or feelings that couldn’t arise until it was’.
- …and then baguette bombed by guerrilla advertisers. To some, using a wonderful piece of public art for commercial advertising was sacriligious and horrific, but I’d argue that complainers may be missing the point that public art by definition must be open to multiple uses, multiple interpretations, and occasional cheeky adaptations. Public art doesn’t say ‘I’m so sacred and elitist and special that you can only see me if you pay lots of money to visit me in my white box.’ It isn’t entirely separate from advertisements, or from decorations. As Banksy has shown, it isn’t in any obvious way distinguishable from vandalism. It blends and interacts with all aspects of everyday life – roads, roundabouts, porches, crossings, bridges.
- Pont des Arts in Paris has now been so excessively decorated with ‘citizen art’ in the form of ‘love padlocks’ that it is falling apart
- Decoration of vehicles is nowhere more flamboyant than in Pakistan (truck picture) and Bangladesh (riskshaw picture). Arguably, private vehicles in South Asia are an exuberant and celebratory form of mobile vehicular public art – although some would say this is merely a conventional decoration system rather than ‘art’.
- Soviet bus stops, by Christopher Herwig
- https://www.thepotholegardener.com
- Bad Dog, by Richard Jackson, Blue Bear, by Lawrence Argent, Denver Conference Center
- Skeleton on a Bike by Ken Unsworth, Bondi Beach Sydney
- David McCracken’s Stairway to Heaven, Bondi Beach, Sydney
- Finally, if admiration of PA stimulates your appreciative brain,don’t forget that a lot of the best public beauty seems to happen without human artists. Credit: memaxmarz flickr cc