Reviewing the Marriage of Art and Government

The alliance between artist and bureaucrat has, historically, created some of the best and worst of civilization’s offerings. The public art of ancient Greece includes temples and public buildings that serve as monumental sculptures. Romans, inspired and challenged by the Greeks, took the notion of an open-air amphitheater to a new level.

On the other hand, the national socialist movements in Germany and Italy this century repressed modern art and individual expression, forcing on artists a sterile and retrograde form of neoclassicism.

With the possible exception of some oeuvres of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, American public art has generally avoided both the highs and lows.

Here and now, in Ventura County, three cities have public arts programs that prove that the union of art and government or art and commerce can, at times, be better than a marriage of convenience.

“The great news about public art is that life is often made better by it,” said staff writer Leonard Reed, who wrote this week’s Centerpiece. “It’s about beauty, about place, about seeing things a new way.”

But now the bad news: Public art is just that--it’s public--and, as such, it is also in-your-face art.

“If you happen to pass by it or must commute by it daily, you have no choice about seeing it or dealing with it. That’s not fun if the piece is ugly or stupid or out of place or somehow violates your tastes,” Reed said. “I’ve always been intrigued by public art for those two reasons. It’s a social as well as aesthetic experience, and it represents some kind of civic yearning to reach beyond the daily grind.”

In looking at some of the more timid, uninspired--and, therefore, less successful--examples of public art, it is easy to hear the sound of public outrage ringing in the heads of bureaucrats who ultimately decide to play it safe. What we don’t hear much is a discussion of what will or won’t stand the test of time.

“I think about all the fountains in Rome, all the sculpture inspired for placement within those fountains, all the relationships parsed, clipped and bonded in the spray of those fountains,” Reed said. “The fountains are public art, and they have much to do with why Rome is Rome. But nobody thought of it as public art 200 years ago.”

Or maybe they did. The classic orders were obeyed as well, and had been since antiquity. Public art, after all, serves a greater function than as flavor du jour.

“The mural on Terminal Freezers in Oxnard is hip, inspired, about community as well as beauty,” Reed said. “The faux water tower on the 101 at Oxnard’s Factory Outlet Center is a ridiculous joke, a perversely Disneyesque estimation.”