Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically accessible to the public; it is installed in public space in both outdoor and indoor settings. Public art seeks to embody public or universal concepts rather than commercial, partisan, or personal concepts or interests. Notably, public art is also the direct or indirect product of a public process of creation, procurement, and/or maintenance.
The Spire of Dublin
Nanas by Niki de Saint Phalle in Hanover, Germany
Chicago Picasso, designed 1962–1963, installed 1967
Mildred Howard's "The House That Will Not Pass for Any Color Than its Own" in Battery Park City, New York City
Art is a diverse range of human activity and its resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent generally expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
Clockwise from upper left: an 1887 self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh; a female ancestor figure by a Chokwe artist; detail from The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486) by Sandro Botticelli; and an Okinawan Shisa lion
20th-century bottle, Twa peoples, Rwanda. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.
Back of a Renaissance oval basin or dish, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Löwenmensch figurine, Germany, between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. One of the oldest-known examples of an artistic representation and the oldest confirmed statue ever discovered.
