Address: Critical irony, neo-authenticity and humour in the art we call public

Abstract/Summary

This text is a critical analysis of the term ‘public art’ and the often unquestioned assumptions that underpin the term’s still-extant currency, this in spite of the mani-fold shifts that have taken place in recent decades that, for me at least, render mori-bund any reductive oppositions between the ‘public’ and the ostensibly ‘private’. Attempting to go beyond the binary of ‘autonomous’, privatized domain of white-cube, ‘gallery art’ versus a putatively ‘socially engaged’ art within the broader domain of the public sphere, I will attempt to argue that the all-too-often elided dimension of the time of art, or art’s durationalty conceived of as spatio-temporal ‘scene-event’ might offer a productive means of exceeding the ossified public-private dialectic.