Article by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times looks at the program's achievements. Says Kimmelman, "the phrase 'successful public art project' may sound like an oxymoron", and we know what he means. In setting the context he ranges across the great NYC public art controversies, Tilted Arc and John Ahearn's busts in the Bronx.

In Kimmelman's view, the Percent for Art Program in New York, with its more than 200 installations "in schools, parks, police precincts and branch libraries", has led to an understanding that public art should be governed by a different set of criteria than gallery art. "Public art might be good but not successful, or vice-versa". Success being a measure of how it is accepted by the public, and here the values are of modesty, and what Adam Gopnik calls a "weakness for didacticism [that] becomes compellingly poetic". Over all, success comes from the ability of a work to insinuate itself into a landscape, to recognize and respond to the passage of time.

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# posted @ 7:56 AM