REBEL: Producing Publics Through Playful Evaluation

In 1995, Lucy Lippard defined public art as “accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves and consults the audiences for or with whom it was made, respecting community and environment”.* Today public art may forego audience consultation, but its evaluation is inescapable, and its value is reflected in widespread digital capture and circulation through social media. The discursive activity of thumbs-ups and likes has a role to play in producing the kind of public sphere Nancy Fraser outlines in her feminist critique of the exclusion and marginalization that marks Jürgen Habermas’s formative work on the subject. But to assume this is the only or pivotal mode of cultural evaluation is to deny public art’s immense potential. 
This paper explores a richer understanding of public art to produce publics and publicness through an unlikely coupling: play and evaluation. Referencing the fundamental importance of play, we use a case study to outline the playful characteristics of REBEL for meaningfully evaluating public art. REBEL stands for Recognising Experience-Based Education and Learning and works as a tool/technique to surface ideas, thoughts, value, experiences and concepts. REBEL provides an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of evaluation based on econometrics and professional consultancy by reflecting on and sharing the significance of public artwork with its publics, one member at a time.

*Lucy R. Lippard, “Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be”, in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 121.

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