ABSTRACT
The previous three chapters set a context within which to theorise and criticise public art-by examining the conceptualisation of the city, by enquiring into the representation and gendering of urban space, and by linking the monument to hegemony in bourgeois society. This chapter considers the literature of public art —after asking if all art is ‘public’, and interrogating the notion of ‘art-and-architecture’—and differentiates the literature of advocacy, which has supported public art as a practice in a critical vacuum, from that which relates it to social issues and might act to re-focus the practice in ways which are more likely to engender social benefits or lead to social change. It takes this approach-of seeing public art through its literaturebecause other sources already give various kinds of survey,1 and because the literature is an informal demarcation of the territory, with many overlaps and disputes but more consensual than a definition imposed by one author.
