Why the Best Public Art Keeps Disappearing

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Thanks to a growing tendency to consume and share artworks on screens, such short-lived projects are now accessible — albeit in a somewhat diminished form — to a larger and more dispersed audience. Artists are responding with works that shoot for spectacle and virality, which often come with mechanisms to translate attention into sales.

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There are indeed commercial benefits to temporary, audacious public art projects. For a number of years, art fairs including Frieze and Art Basel have included public installations within their programming. Though these exhibits are organized and paid for by commercial galleries, there is a tendency to display sculptures that are optimized for public attention and discourse, which ideally (but not always) lead to sales.

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One of the most widely documented artworks from last year’s Art Basel in Paris wasn’t inside the fair but installed at Place Vendôme as part of the fair’s public program. It was a 20-meter-long helium balloon in the shape of a prostrate Kermit the Frog by Alex Da Corte, co-produced by the artist and his gallery, Sadie Coles HQ. The sculpture was installed in the same spot where Paul McCarthy’s controversial Tree, a suggestively shaped, 24-meter inflatable sculpture, stood for a short period in 2014. 

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Scrolling through the location’s top posts on Instagram, snaps of influencers and supercars are punctuated by images of the two sculptures. Though they were each only in situ for a matter of days, their afterlives on social media — and in the public imagination — continue today. Da Corte’s inflatable Kermit will likely be tough to sell as an artwork, but it projected his name to a wider audience than a gallery show or fair booth could have.

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Consider the recent exhibition by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto at Nahmad Projects in London — 15 new paintings of life-sized figures on mirrors alongside works by Pablo Picasso. It may not be considered a significant cultural moment, whereas Three Mirrors — his new moving image work — is now being broadcast once a day on 23 public screens in locations including Casablanca, London and Seoul. The project is a collaboration with Circa, a public art platform that’s funded by print sales. 

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Now public art in the form of public spectacle is coming full circle. In June, the French artist JR will unveil a work that pays homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude shortly after the 40th anniversary of their installation, transforming the 120m-long Pont Neuf into a rocky cave, using an inflatable structure that’s 17m tall at its highest point. “It might be the largest immersive artwork in the world,” he tells me. La Caverne du Pont Neuf will stand for three weeks.

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Though he was only two when The Pont Neuf Wrapped was unveiled, it left a mark on him. “Even now, when I pass by the Pont Neuf, you cannot not think about the fact that at some point there was all this energy around the bridge, wrapping it up,” he says. “It shows you the power of public art, they really opened a massive door there.”

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Like the work this project pays tribute to, La Caverne will have no financial support from the government, instead receiving backing from private funders (including Bloomberg Philanthropies, Snap Inc. and Paris Aéroport) and artwork sales. La Caverne will be impossible to sell in any conventional sense, but it will accompany an exhibition of more collector-friendly works relating to the project at Perrotin, the artist’s French gallery. 

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In a 2017 essay for Art Monthly, the curator and writer Lisa Le Feuvre — once head of sculpture studies at the Henry Moore Institute — described her relationship with a William Mitchell mural near her home: “I walked past it for 15 years without seeing it.”

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Impermanence, on the other hand, captures attention. “I’ve seen time stand still in Piccadilly,” says Circa’s founder and artistic director Josef O’Connor, describing the organization’s daily screenings in the heart of London. “I’ve felt the sense of one of the busiest junctions in the city slowing down — even if it’s just for 10 minutes.”

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