Contemporary Public Art and Dialectical Aspects of the ‘Democratization’ of the Urban Public Space.

Abstract

All artistic practices have a political dimension because they play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order but also create challenges to it. The contemporary art world’s historic ‘gatekeeper’ organizations – e.g., auction houses, museums, biennials and fairs, publishing houses, university departments and art schools – located in western Europe and the US since the late-nineteenth-century have derived their continuing power within the capitalist system, that are socio-political, ideological, cultural, aesthetic and economic. Hence, the art world’s domination on art’s production, dissemination and reception has also been limited and vulnerable to many kinds of social and cultural pressures.