It may simply be the fate of public art to become invisible over time. That big sculpture in the city park, so lauded when it was first installed years ago, eventually loses its grandeur and becomes just another obstacle to walk around. The mural covering the wall of a building no longer evokes community pride but instead suggests urban blight as its surface becomes weathered and its colors fade.
Public art—part of an effort over the past sixty years to bring contemporary art out of commercial galleries, placing it in public spaces on a grand scale—is intended to make the culture of our times more visible. Getting us to continue looking at this art and reacting to it is the goal of the public agencies and private organizations that sponsor it, and it’s a tougher challenge than you might realize. So much public art is monumental—i.e., difficult to move—yet one of the best ways to keep people engaged is to give them something new.
“I’m a big proponent of temporary public art,” Debra Simon, an art consultant who has been hired to develop short-term public art projects in New York City, told Observer. “They cost less than permanent installations, give artists more opportunities to create works, have more flexibility in how they design projects and encourage repeat visits. If you have more and different artworks appearing at a particular site, people will come again to see what’s there. It’s not just been-there-done-that, which so often occurs with permanent pieces.”
Temporary public artworks also have the benefit of limiting criticism of the ‘You call that art?’ and ‘My tax dollars paid for that?’ varieties (see Iván Argote’s Dinosaur on Manhattan’s High Line). People are less likely to raise a stink when they know an artwork will only be on display temporarily. London’s ‘Fourth Plinth’ commission series, for example, has regularly sparked controversy, but the artwork is switched out every two years.
Since these works are just temporary, “the disagreement stays within bounds,” said Steven J. Tepper, president of Hamilton College and author of Not Here, Not Now, Not That!, which looks at art protests in the U.S. “No one feels like they have to escalate and mobilize to get something removed. Temporary public art can serve as a valuable ‘boundary object,’ a term sociologists use for something that forces people to articulate sometimes hidden beliefs, preferences or values.”
Permanent public art installations outnumber temporary ones in part because of how the art is funded. The federal government’s General Services Administration, twenty-five states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territory of Guam, as well as numerous municipalities, have percent-for-art statutes requiring the expenditure of between one and two percent of construction costs for many government buildings to be used for the purchase of permanent works of art for these sites. “Public art encourages pride in a neighborhood,” said Chantal M. Healey, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group. “It encourages economic investment, and it is a source of thoughtfulness.”
Private nonprofit organizations like the Chicago Public Art Group, Mural Arts Philadelphia and New York’s Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Public Art Fund are much more likely to offer funding for temporary art projects.
Temporary public art gives artists “opportunities they might not have otherwise,” said Kate D. Levin, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs who currently oversees the Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts program. The process of obtaining approval for a work of permanent public art, she noted, often is much longer, requiring numerous meetings with government agencies and community groups, sometimes involving negotiations over land use. “With temporary, we are allowed to be more nimble, introducing artworks in a public sphere,” without as much fuss, “and allowing artists the flexibility to try out ideas that might not be as acceptable if their pieces were to be permanent.” Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Public Art Challenge program, which arranges for the installation of public art projects for between a few weeks to two years, often focuses on politically hot-button issues, such as climate change, homelessness, gun violence or food insecurity. Communities may not want permanent reminders of social ills, but shorter-term displays encourage discussion and make these themes more palatable.
Nicholas Baume, artistic and executive director of Public Art Fund, noted similarly that the shorter time scale of temporary projects “allows artists to respond to a context, a particular issue that people are talking about now. These commissioned works of art take on an issue, and perhaps that is the limit of their efficacy.”
Both Levin and Baume said that there is no competition in the public art field between temporary and permanent pieces. “This isn’t either-or but both-and,” Levin said. In recent years, Public Art Fund has edged into the commissioning of permanent works of public art—Baume pointed out that “a successful work of art is one that can survive beyond the relevance of its subject matter.”
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Tom Eccles, executive director of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and former director of Public Art Fund, told Observer that when he “put temporary artworks all around the city,” the unveiling of a new piece regularly generated between half a dozen and a dozen angry phone calls. “The artwork was a lightning rod for something else they were angry about.” However, after several months, when the temporary piece was removed, “I would get dozens of phone calls from people telling me how much they loved the work and were upset that it was gone.”
Calibrating the value of public artwork based on how long it is on display can be tricky. Certainly, the cost of temporary and permanent artworks separates the two significantly. Jane Golden, founder and executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, said that permanent artworks cost between $10,000 and $300,000, with the average being $35,000 to $45,000, while temporary pieces usually run between $3,000 and $8,000. The amount of money spent on a single large-scale mural could potentially finance numerous projects throughout the city involving many different artists.
One cost savings area is the expense of cleaning, maintaining and restoring permanent pieces. Mural Arts Philadelphia has a mural restoration budget, which annually works on thirty to thirty-five murals in need of care. Every year “some murals have to go to mural heaven,” Golden said, because damage from the elements or graffiti have taken too great a toll. Other murals are “just lost to new construction. This city is gentrifying all the time.” The dynamism of urban areas can make the concept of permanence seem quaint and suggests that temporary projects may be more appropriate for growing municipalities.
Although named Mural Arts, the organization has occasionally taken on the commissioning and installation of sculptures, “but only when these works come with a restoration fund,” which is not often the case. Percent-for-Art programs generally provide funding for the creation and installation of new pieces, but there is rarely money for upkeep, and so many permanent projects around the country fall into disrepair. Even when there is money for restoration, or a requirement to provide care for public pieces, there is no guarantee that maintenance will happen. Mary Miss’ Greenwood Pond: Double Site, a land art project at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, was roundly praised when it was installed in 1996 (former Whitney Museum of American Art director Maxwell Anderson said the installation “enjoys an importance and prominence in public art second to none in this country”) but, by 2023, it had been so ravaged by time and the elements that the Art Center’s director decided it should be removed. The contract that the artist signed with the Art Center twenty-nine years ago stipulated that the Center would maintain the installation, but it simply didn’t.
Another permanent public artwork, Athena Tacha’s Marianthe, which was first installed on the grounds of Edison Community College in Florida in 1985, was contractually required to be kept “in good condition and repair,” but was allowed to deteriorate to the point of becoming what the school called “an attractive nuisance.” It was eventually destroyed.
“Everything deteriorates,” Eccles said. “That’s a fact of life. The question is: what do you want to retain?” In the sixty years that “public art” has been a term and a cause, proponents often cite European cities, such as Florence and Venice in Italy, that have architecture and open-air statuary dating back hundreds of years as a model of how artworks give character to a place. According to this argument, as a much younger nation, the U.S. has a lot of catching up to do. Sculptors today are less likely to work in timeless stone, however, and more likely to gravitate to materials that need more regular maintenance—or those using technology that might not be feasible to maintain in the future.
But Baume said that “‘permanent’ is a misnomer. What does permanent mean?” and added that a growing number of public art commissioning agreements with artists look ahead only twenty-five years, which may be as close to permanent as we’re going to get. Perhaps, twenty-five years seems like a long time or perhaps it’s simply long enough.