Some Thoughts on the Role of Art in Public Places

When I look around our communities, I am often struck by their aesthetic barrenness.  Mostly I see signs of commerce, billboards, business signs, logos of consumer products, advertisements, and of course, flyers and more flyers. This echoed by radios in so many places exhorting me to buy, buy, buy because time is running out. Much of the food I buy comes packaged in artwork designed to persuade me to acquire even more. Much of the content in our media is increasingly dominated by the tabloid mentality which glorifies what is trivial and bizarre. In general, the use of images is primarily in the hands of commerce.

 Apart from the beauty of nature, very seldom do I see a work of art, a beautiful form, a place to reflect, an image to contemplate, a painting, a sculpture, a shrine of any type, a memorial, anything that points to deeper dimensions of life.

The most beautiful things in life are not things!  Have we lost all vision of what the really important things in life are? Should we not stress the importance of family bonds, of the joy and wonder of childhood? Should we not celebrate the beauty of the human form and make our surroundings bright and beautiful with uplifting images of wonderful human achievements?

Where can I find images which depict the virtues of compassion and love? How do we commemorate the victims of violence who parade in tour consciousness on a daily basis? Where are the memorials to the abused children who are so devastated by the inner suffering which they cannot reveal? Can we not acknowledge their pain and reach out to them in life and in art?

Where are the sites that allow us to contemplate our aspirations for racial harmony and world peace? Where is the art that call us from our hard unfeeling shells? Where are the images that beckon us to overcome our limitations over the forces that would tear us apart? Where are the heroes, immortalized in granite, in marble and bronze, who incarnate our longing for transcendence?

How can I remember again and again the beauty of the young child held in love, the beauty of childhood, the joy in innocence of a child unless these are mirrored in my surroundings? Show me the joy of the child, show me the thrill of discovery that I might find these again in my heart and in my life. How can I reinvent myself, my community, and my culture and champion again  the values of inner peace, of joy , of love and compassion unless I embody these and depict them in my public spaces?

These human experiences and aspirations are the proper subjects of art. Many artists have lost sight of these values in the search to be avant garde or to shock the viewer.

We must go beyond these reductionist views of life lest our hearts become cold and we are no longer citizens, but merely consumers. We are in a landscape bare of meaning, our ears teeming with jingles, houses overflowing with products. Our souls will suffocate, our spirits will wither, and we will be no longer human at all.

It does not have to be this way. As an artist I have the vision to let art again reclaim its rightful place in our imaginations and  in our public spaces. Great images linger in our unconscious long after they are first perceived and they can recreate our deeper selves.  Let us use art to point the way to those things which matter most to human beings on all continents.

Will you help me shape this vision and make it our common reality?