Vito Acconci Reading: Paragraph Analysis

Paragraph 18:
"The built environment is built because it's been allowed to be built. It's been allowed to be built because it stands for and reflects an institution or a dominant culture. The budget for architecture is a hundred times the budget for public art because a building provides jobs and products and services that augment the finances of a city. Public art comes in through the back door like a second-class citizen. Instead of bemoaning this, public art can use this marginal position to its advantage: public art can present itself as the voice of marginal cultures, as the minority report, as the opposition part. Public art exists to thicken the plot."

This paragraph, while short, makes an interesting point about public art. It first says that public art is not supported nearly as much as architecture or other such structure because it does not provide a service or other practical reason for its existence like said architecture. However, Acconici says this is not a bad thing. He says that because public art is somewhat pushed to the side, it is free to represent views and cultures that are also pushed to the side instead of only focusing on the mainstream culture, unlike architecture which is supported for the sole reason of supporting popular opinion and culture. As he says, "Public are exists to thicken the plot", adding flavor and substance to a space and media that would otherwise be bland and altogether too consistent in nature to remain interesting. For this reason, public art will constantly be changing, with the last "generation" of art sometimes developing into mainstream while a new "generation" will begin to represent the new non-standard cultures and ideas of the time.