Review of Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics

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Notes

1 Within the context of this book, public art is defined as “any artistic creation that has the intent or effect of addressing democratic values and occurs in public spaces” (p. 10). Additionally, for the purposes of this book, the author solely focuses on public art within the United States.

2 Rooted in Greek mythology, Evans (2018) used the term oracle to describe voices in the context of political aesthetics that are “raised to the level of the ‘one true god,’ the ‘pure race,’ the superior gender (‘patriarchalism’), the acceptable sexual-orientation (‘heterosexism’), the natural economy (‘capitalism’), or any other dogma that has or seeks social hegemony to the detriment of the creative interplay among the other voices of the social body” (p. 38).

3 When refining the criterion for determining if public art qualifies as an act of citizenship in democracy, Evans (2018) explored the terms “voices,” “oracles,” and “multivoiced body” as an ontology and established that the “creative interplay” of such dialogical exchanges establish individuals as “dialogic beings” (p. 233).