ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issues of publicness within public artworks. It explains three ways of considering art and the concept of publics: Picturing Publics, Educating Publics and Benefiting Publics. Artists use action and intervention as a way of performing their social critique. Participatory art practice, relational aesthetics and new genre public art can be described as an art that engages directly with the political imagination as opposed to representing it. The use of a public sphere theory framework to emphasize the social and political interactions within the term 'public' resonates with Massey's theory that space is too often understood as formal, physical and static. Jurgen Habermas's 1989 ([1962]) concept of the bourgeois public sphere is a virtual or imaginary community that does not exist in any specific location. Under neo-liberalism the interests of capital have dominated public spaces.
