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Change of Art

<29> This was a half-hour radio programme commissioned by the media production company Somethingelse Productions and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Shoben, who is well-known for his interactive art-works that transform public spaces, was commissioned to make a programme tackling questions about the role of public art, particularly challenging any artwork’s right to a permanent position in a particularly place. The exploration began with library research discovering historical precedents for rotating or retiring art on public display: Michelangelo’s David, for example, only found a public position by replacing Donatello’s Judith and Holoferness. One question that had to be addressed then is: who is responsible for deciding what artworks should be in what public spaces. This turned out to be a much more complicated question than anticipated. Archival research and interviews with officials uncovered layers of uncertainty about the ownership and maintenance responsibilities of a substantial amount of art in public spaces: works, for example that were part of the original design of a building and were not sold when the building was sold. These orphaned works are forgotten and unmaintained. Shoben also explored the question as to who should be responsible for these decisions. Another question he addressed consisted of: Should there be a use-by date on artworks? This leads to quite fundamental questions about art as ephemeral or permanent. Shoben interviewed a great number of stakeholders to elicit views, getting different views on the amount and type of public involvement there should be. He crowdsourced some answers through Flickr. For the programme itself, he interviewed Antony Gormley, and Sandy Nairne (director of the National Portrait Gallery). Shoben uncovers these problems in a kind of action research as he tries to arrange an art rotation himself and finds the council entirely uninterested in even considering it.