ABSTRACT
Despite “the triumph of art for the public,” as Elizabeth Gilmore Holt put it, 1 public art itself is not ascendant. The kind of art that triumphed of course is the personally based art distributed by galleries and museums. The term public art denotes works that are to be seen outside the special viewing that the exhibition system provides. There is a great difference between seeing works of art in places designed to show them and seeing them accidentally, in the course of doing something else, on the edge of other activity. The public work is seen by an unspecialized public, diversified by age, sex, income, and race, whereas the public for art is pre-selected by the act of attending a museum, even more so by going to an art gallery.
