Public Art - Seeking Role Models

Sentries stand guard.

They watch cars and trucks roll down Granby St., between Brambleton Avenue and Virginia Beach Boulevard.

They are wrapped in metal foil. They are lifeless.Their skulls empty, they are brainless. 

This is public art.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso

But the adage prevails: I know it (art) when I see it. Do you? 

So drive down Granby St., the womb of Norfolk’s arts and design district.

Art gestates here.

Public art adorns walls, billboards, and now sidewalks.

Public art grows.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

 Paul Cezanne

Don’t dismiss this groundswell of popularity.

Public art will spread, capturing the urban landscape of downtown Norfolk. 

Art angers and aggravates.

Art transcends.

Art transforms.

Art assaults our senses and plays on our emotions.

Art engages, confounds, perplexes. 

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

 Paul Cezanne

Art is politics, culture and society.

Art as mass market, investment, rate of return…Androgynous.

Is this the future of art in Norfolk?

 “It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.” 
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New