Today marks the first day of Art Everywhere 2014, a ‘national outdoor art exhibition that aims to flood the streets with great British art’ (Source: Art Everywhere website). A not-for-profit collaboration between the UK ‘out of home’ advertising industry, the Art Fund, Tate, Facebook and others, Art Everywhere describes itself as ‘A Very Very Big Art Show’.
The project is ‘Big’ on many fronts. Over the next six weeks it will present giant (and smaller scale) reproductions of 25 paintings by British artists on 30,000 public billboard and poster advertising sites across the UK. In doing so the project claims to be able to reach an audience amounting to 90% of the UK population. The project is crowd curated: the final selection of the 25 images was decided through a Facebook poll that received 38,000 votes. It is also partially crowd funded, with supporters gaining various levels of reward for their cash donations. And it’s social too – making full use of Twitter and Instagram to promote to and engage with audiences.
In its ‘bringing art out of the gallery, onto the streets, and to the people’ ethos Art Everywhere would seem to offer a glossy and sophisticated media version of public art. But like much public art it’s not without some controversy. While some contemporary artists have been keen supporters (Antony Gormley and Grayson Perry jointly launched the 2014 project last week and the artist Bob and Roberta Smith offered similar endorsement to the 2013 edition) others have been more critical. In an A-N debate on the project last year some artists questioned whether Art Everywhere could in any way constitute ‘good public art’. While some A-N contributors argued that any new opportunity for the public to engage with visual artworks must be regarded as positive (and certainly better than gazing at just another car advert) others criticised the project for being ‘safe’, ‘gimmicky’, and ‘patronising’. In focusing on the reproduction of existing and often well-known artworks it was regarded by many of these artists as a missed opportunity to commission new and context specific work. And of course, as A-N’s Susan Jones reminded readers, using billboards and public media as a site for artists’ works is hardly a new phenomenon. Similarly as another contributor to the A-N discussion suggested, conventional permanently sited public art collections, such as the ‘220 Public Artworks’ to be encountered in Milton Keynes might also be happily tagged as #arteverywhere
I wonder whether there be much debate on the Art Everywhere project this year, and if so where will this go?
NOTE: this year Art Everywhere is even bigger – it now has a US version too.
Public Art PhD 