News Coverage of the Failed Plensa Project: How Framing Affected the Diffusion of Public Art

Abstract

This study combines diffusion theory and framing theory to analyze news coverage of a failure to diffuse a large-scale public art project into a renovated Southern downtown. Parallel concepts between framing and diffusion are outlined and used in the quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The authors found that the dominant procedural frames boosted the legitimacy of the donor and museum director while shorting elected officials and the artist. Substantive frames focused on blame while emphasizing a punch-list of practical concerns rather than artistic notions. This shaped the proposed remedies and directed the public's reaction to those same problems. Elites' addition of complexity to the public art proposal slowed its diffusion, along with its lack of compatibility with local artistic norms and limited resonance with the city's identity.

Notes

¹Raleigh's investment in its downtown reflected the arguments of the New Urbanists, who urged the end of the “placelessness” that was created with the 20th-century abandonment of U.S. downtowns in favor of the suburbs (Makagon, 2000). In addition, it was geared to catering to “the creative class,” what Richard Florida (2002) called the knowledge workers that comprise a large component of Raleigh's workforce in the biotechnology, telecommunications, and digital technology sectors. Employees at three major research universities and a host of other educational institutions are also members of this creative class stretching across the larger Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill region known as the Research Triangle. Florida (2005) argued that building culturally rich metropolitan areas attracts the innovative workers that the United States needs to compete on a global scale, and Raleigh's industrial recruiters have worked to attract such groups. These citizens tend to be the “haves,” inserted in the last few decades into a North Carolina economy that formerly was largely dependent on textiles, furniture, and agriculture.

²Diffusion is appropriately applied to larger scale social change. The authors note that this study is a small step toward more comprehensive analysis of the diffusion of various modes of art and architecture in urban communities.

³A study of the Raleigh News & Observer coverage of Latinos in the early 1990s (Vargas, 2000) found that although it may not have been intended, the newspaper's coverage of Latinos portrayed them as an underclass. Recent poll results in North Carolina (Center for Research in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2007) found that only 3.3% of respondents would like it if a Hispanic moved into their neighborhood, and 47.3% thought the growth of Hispanics in North Carolina was bad.