Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy - An Essay in Political Aesthetics

Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.

List of contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Democracy’s Fragility and the Political Aesthetics of Public Art
2. Voices and Places: The Space of Public Art and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection
3. Democracy’s “Empty Place”: Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Derrida’s Democracy to Come
4. Public Art’s “Plain Tablet”: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Art
5. Democracy and Public Art: Badiou and Rancière
6. The Political Aesthetics of Chicago’s Millennium Park
7. The Political Aesthetics of New York’s National 9/11 Memorial
8. Public Art as an Act of Citizenship
Appendix: Badiou On “Being and the Void”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Fred Evans is professor emeritus of philosophy at Duquesne University. He is the author of Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (1993) and The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (Columbia, 2009) and coeditor of Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (2000).

Summary

Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.

Additional text

Impressively argued and researched.

Product details

• Authors: Fred Evans, Fred (Professor Evans, Evans Fred
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2021
• EAN: 9780231187596
• ISBN: 978-0-231-18759-6
• No. of pages: 360
• Series: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; PHILOSOPHY / Political, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, ART / Art & Politics, ART / Public Art, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Social & political philosophy, social and political philosophy, Political structures: democracy, History of Art, History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -, Philosophy: aesthetics, Art and politics