Interventions in Public Spaces: Contemporary Art, Institution, and the City

Hou Hanru (Rudolf Wittkower Fellow)

Today, contemporary art and its institutions tends to be absorbed into a quasi-hegemonic system of conception, production, distribution, and communication dominated by the logic of neoliberal entertainment and consumption. This is driven by privatization of social space, which goes hand-in-hand with technological innovations. This also accelerates the redefinition of artistic practices as a “service sector” of the global capitalistic production and speculation disguised as “cultural industry”. How to resist such a seemly unstoppable tendency of cultural transformation in order to defend and promote the sense of “being creative” as a possibility to re-imagine the public good and re-emphasize diversity and freedom as the foundation of a democratic society is now an urgent challenge for artists and art institutions. Projects with original visions and strategies, using diverse languages ranging from performance to digital “media art”, have been developed to reconnect “creativity” with public spaces. Cities, with their streets, plazas and other infrastructure, are increasingly explored as sites of “alternative”, often “provocative” interventions. This in turn is supported by institutions aiming to defend their own roles as public forums for creative minds. A new tension between different and even conflicting understandings and practices of making art is hence playing out on the boundaries that at the same time separate and mediate between the public and private realms. In an age of globalization, this tension is intensifying everywhere in the world, especially in major “global cities”.