Public art between relational combinatorial and art as inappropriate passion

Abstract

There exists a consensus about the fact that, if there is such thing as public art – not just art for public spaces, it would always be an art that is focused on the social sphere and on a shared reception. Expressly or not, its text would therefore be public. But during the last two decades it is art as a whole that is thinking about reception and recognizing its unavoidable public dimension, thus generating debates around it social and emancipatory dimensions. This text stems from a part of the theory appeared in that sense and particularly relevant in thinking what Public Art can be today. From the idea of an expanded limit as emancipatory diversity and through the concept of social interstice, relational aesthetics and the concept of postproduction are thoroughly presented, underlining in the conversation the formal-communicative excess of its theory and the danger of diluting the contents into mere relational phenomenology. Taking for granted Public Art’s interest in relational aesthetics, but also its debatable political potential, there is a final reflection about the inevitable political being of art, pinpointing, in an illustrated bend, that it is preferably from an aesthetic action that it can become effective in the social sphere.