Hopefully this won't be too scary: DC Public Art Master Plan

It'd be nice to have a real cultural plan for the city first (I have a vision paper about the basic need here: Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). There are a number of quality plans and resources for cultural planning out there. Some cities and states have programs that designate and support arts and cultural districts.

The Arts and Culture element of the DC Comprehensive Plan is pretty weak, more a collection of items, rather than a comprehensive plan.

From email:

Public Art Community Open House led by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is conducting a city-wide Public Art Master Plan. We invite you to an Open House to participate and share your thoughts on Public Art in your neighborhood, which will be included in the overall DC Creates Public Art Program Vision in the District of Columbia.

Date: Tuesday February 10, 2009
Time: 5pm to 7pm
Location: Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library 901 G Street, NW

The DC Creates Public Art Program will preserve the cultural health, reflect the diverse fabric and promote creative innovation in Washington, DC by reinforcing urban places that become the heart of every community.

Also see my entry: You Gotta Have Community Building from January 2007.

A real issue is art and public art vs. art as a community building and affirmation exercise. Now, a lot of community based public art isn't that great. Artists also make the point that if you want to have an art community, pay artists to produce art.

And a "public art" master plan could be interpreted as to be about engaging the public in art, not just about "public art" which Wikipedia defines as:

works of art in any media that has been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in the public domain, usually outside and accessible to all.

As we discuss in the blog from time to time, DC is more a community that consumes art, and the public institutions are oriented to providing art for consumption of art generally produced elsewhere, rather than a community that supports the production of art (the engravers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, who produce the dies for stamps, money, and other documents).

Earlier in the week, I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and it's a great place to ponder many issues related to the production, mass production, and consumption of art.

Sadly, I don't know much about art history and cultural studies... In the summer, at the Hyattsville branch of the PG County Library, I picked up a bunch of discarded copies of the National Geographic Magazine from the 1960s. One issue included a paean to Walt Disney and Disneyland (I don't have the citation at my fingertips). Imagine my surprise a couple months later to find a copy of an issue of National Geographic from March 2007, albeit published about 40 years later, containing a much more dystopic cultural studies oriented view of DisneyWorld and its impact on Orlando, "Disney World, Orlando Beyond Disney."

This gave rise to the idea that it would be fun to write an essay on the consumption of the museum experience in DC and how the narrative focuses on promoting and maintaining prevalent and predominant American myth(ology).

Museums elsewhere, but I don't know about the major museums in other countries, tend to offer exhibits that are much more critical of prevailing ideas and present the latest in scholarship.

I think one of the reasons that the National Museum of the American Indian is criticized so much is that it questions, by using different reference points, this myth. Similarly, it will be interesting to see what happens with the narrative at the Smithsonian National African-American History and Art Museum.

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Relatedly, check out this old entry, "How to Think about Public Art" from the Aesthetic Grounds blog from ArtsJournal, which starts out with this:

How to think about public art? Do you just keep doing the same thing? Big art? Architectural intimacy? Site-specific narrative? Locally responsive?

Internationally, public art has been institutionalized as the founder's dreamed in the 1960 and 1970s. Big - intimate - narrative - responsive. Most importantly, appreciated by a small, but growing group, and accepted by most. Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" would NEVER be removed today.

What was not anticipated was 1.) public art as a defined field separate from museum art and 2.) global uniformity. They could not have imagined 1.) daily Internet access to any public artwork and 2.) participation in public art through cell phones and Internet.

What has not materialized in the USA is 1.) respect for the individual artistic career and 2.) pride (or tolerance) in a culture that sponsors artworks of political and social content. Respect continues to expand for artists in the corporate or spectacular arts - movies, music videos, concerts, advertising, fireworks, theme parks, architecture (and some urban space or landscapes). For time being, the Internet provides the public venue for creative public works in politics and social observation.

Were we a more organized local populace, perhaps the "public art master plan" could become the process where we could grapple with some of these questions, including having a museum culture that it oriented nationally and internationally rather than locally.