Abstract
Public art and common goods, although belonging to apparently distant realms of inquiry, share a long history and, inevitably, an evolving meaning. This chapter investigates the evolution of the practice of public art with the objective to obtain a viable understanding of how the value of public art is produced today. With a focus on the future of public art, this chapter investigates three public art cases. The results of the qualitative analysis of these public art experiences are interpreted from an institutional economics perspective. The combination of public art and the theory of commons sheds light on what seems to be the most important attributes of common goods in the current debate, that is the social practices that constitute the act of making the commons.
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Notes
- 1.
On the same location of I am Queen Mary, an abstract, untitled marble sculpture by Danish artist Søren Georg Jensen sits since 1979.
- 2.
Examples of intellectual infrastructures are: basic research, ideas, languages (Frischmann 2012).
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Morea, V. (2020). Public Art Today. How Public Art Sheds Light on the Future of the Theory of Commons. In: Macrì, E., Morea, V., Trimarchi, M. (eds) Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54418-8_6
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