Aesthetics in Everyday Life – The Meaning of Collective Recognition
In 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The announcement astonished many: how could popular music be linked to literature? Wasn’t the Nobel Prize in Literature traditionally reserved for written poetry and prose? Could this be a sign that the award was expanding its boundaries in response to the times?
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, artist, and writer whose work has exerted profound influence on global popular music and culture.
In May 1963, Dylan released his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which included the song Blowin’ in the Wind (written in 1962 and later released as a single). The song soon resonated across the world. In June 1962, accompanied by Dylan’s own commentary, it appeared in the quarterly Sing Out! where he articulated the belief underlying the piece:
“There ain't too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain't in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it's in the wind – and it's blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won't believe that. I still say it's in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it's got to come down some ... But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know ... and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it's wrong. I'm only 21 years old and I know that there's been too many ... You people over 21, you're older and smarter.”1
While people marveled at whether a songwriter’s work could belong in the realm of literature and merit such recognition, someone mused: “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.” I cannot say for certain whether growing older truly makes one smarter, but without question, life needs the guiding and inspiring power of beauty. In a gust of wind, the sight of a falling leaf can awaken an entire stream of thought. Only when we possess the ability to perceive and discern beauty can you and I dwell poetically.
Artists see life through an aesthetic lens — sensing its poetry, feeling its texture. Much of the beauty in life must be revealed by those with sensitivity, inspiration, distinctive vision, and depth of thought, transforming the abstract into expressions that others can recognize. By savoring the art interwoven into public life, we can receive messages of beauty, escape ignorance and monotony, and live a fulfilling and beautiful life. Dylan, through his songs and concerts, amplified a sense of place and emotional resonance, evoking an underlying meaning that is collectively recognized. People don't necessarily have the same feelings and standard answers regarding aesthetic sense. Yet the question remains: how do we inspire the broader public to seek beauty? That is the value of engaging in dialogue about aesthetics within the shared space of the public realm.
What we understand is that without a profound depth of thought and a clearly articulated vision, the themes revealed in fragments cannot constitute what lies beyond mere form — the so-called “artistry.” Contemporary art walks in solitude through the mist, and especially when considered against the disciplinary divisions of past modes of production, it signals an alternative discussion on “public value.” This is precisely where “public art” asserts its significance — emphasizing public dialogue, reflecting social connections and urban memory, and engaging in innovative, participatory “artistic interventions in space.” Seen in this light, does it not further confirm that Bob Dylan’s music, songs, and poetry not only meet the paradigm of literature recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature, but also embody the very influence on “humanity” and “society” that public art has long aspired to achieve.
Hmm… Right? Or Not Quite?
In early December 2023, during the 3rd session of the “Public Art Agency System Consultation Forum”, an artist representative raised a pointed question: “What’s with all this ‘public’ in public art? ‘Community participation’? Art is art. Let’s talk about the art first! If it isn’t even art, what’s the point? After so many years of public art development, there are only a handful of works that truly catch the eye. Most of what we see are simply collaborations between artists and ‘design objects,’ not genuine artworks. Public art should begin with the ‘art’ before the ‘public.’ But at present, the focus is on ‘public design objects,’ and the art itself is lost. We need to clarify the term ‘public art’ once and for all.”2
Hmm… right? Or not quite? This perspective, grounded in a standard of pure aesthetic value, indeed responds to a current reality in Taiwan: much of what is labeled “public art” has drifted toward commercial commissions, factory production, and form-for-form’s-sake projects, leading to a creeping vulgarization. After all, what exactly is "art" anyway? And is “public art” truly unrelated to the “public”? I suspect this is not a matter of linguistic translation. Rather, in some cases, of a lack of concern for art that is of and for the public.
The expression of “art” is not merely the precision of form honed through professional training and the purpose of “public” art is not simply about permanent outdoor placement, directly transplanting traditional “sculpture” into “public property”, occupying a patch of land to display to the world. Rather, “public” or “community” art is more akin to an artist crafting a table: its existence creates an opportunity for people to draw near, to gather, and to engage in dialogue.
Even the Angel of the North (1998) by British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950) in Gateshead, northern England, was the result of meticulous site selection — the former pithead baths of a coal mine — chosen for its relationship to the surrounding landscape, transport routes, and sightlines. It stands as a translation of the history of miners laboring beneath the red iron hills. Gormley described his intent: “The hill top site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face has no individual features. The work’s effect lies in its alertness, the awareness of space, and the angle of the wings — they are not flat, they are angled 3.5 degrees forward to create a sense of embrace.”
Gormley elaborated on the question often posed to him about Angel of the North:
“People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The Angel has three functions – firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears—the sculpture is something that evolves.”3
Thus, for Gormley, sculpture was no longer merely a work molded in the likeness of his own vision and assembled from chosen materials; it was the outcome of field research, environmental study, and considered interpretation. This was not a “design object,” but a rigorously self-accountable act of presentation.
In the same way, we often think of Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) as a sculptor, yet overlook that what he truly interpreted was spatial landscape. In 1969, Taiwanese sculptor Ying-Feng Yang, writing in Fine Arts Magazine (Vol. 29) in his article “A Giant Step in Sculpture — The First Decade of Landscape Sculpture Exhibitions”, introduced to readers the work of Austrian sculptor Karl Prantl (1923–2010). Yang noted that in 1959 Prantl had organized the world’s first stone sculpture landscape exhibition, an event that reverberated internationally, inspiring similar gatherings worldwide. That was more than a decade ago. He urged that in the following decade, sculptors should follow the trend so that “landscape sculpture” would not remain a mere label. Here, however, was a linguistic misstep: Prantl’s original term “landscape sculpture” (Landschaftsskulptur) was mistranslated as “scenery sculpture”, implying works made purely to beautify surroundings. While this mistranslation inadvertently seeded the development of the “public art” discourse, it also steered the profession toward environmental decoration as a starting point.
Prantl was more than a stone sculptor, he was the first in the postwar era to revive the classical Greek symposium model, founding in 1959 the European Sculpture Symposium (Symposium Europäischer Bildhauer), an international gathering that would inspire collaborative creation among artists (somewhat akin to the poetic assemblies of China’s Orchid Pavilion Gathering). Prantl frequently assist Japan via traveling through Taiwan in establishing international art creation symposiums "Symposien" in over 3 cities, though few know that his son studied modern dance, and his daughter-in-law, a Taiwanese pianist, graduated from the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. During my own studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1993, I came to know the Prantl family personally, often invited to their rehearsals and tea gatherings. He cared deeply and understood Taiwan.
Prantl’s thinking evolved from a focus on “artistic autonomy” — the affirmation of the artist’s “being-there” (Dasein) — toward the value of “being-with” (Mitsein), urging: “Artists must leave their studios, embrace the cliffs, fields, forests, and plazas of the world, and work with the ‘materials of the natural environment’, creating in open spaces and entering into dialogue with people.”
“Place” defines the spatial qualities and inner character of public art, while “participation” offers a way to exchange memories and stories anew.
It is by now almost a commonplace to speak of the 3 possible dimensions of public aesthetics: 1. “The publicness of place”, 2. “The publicness of issues”, 3. “The publicness of participation”.4
Artists develop their own linguistic forms in the hope of generating infectious and beneficial perception within public space. To achieve this, their work must engage in an explicit dialogue with and guide the audience through the site’s existing context and memories. Many exemplary works foreground this dialogic presence, re-referencing the “place” in ways that deepen meaning across cultural, psychological, material, and even imagined spaces. Public artists weave a dense “collaborative relationship” between “work,” “place,” and “community” — a “collaboration” here understood as a mutual exploration that enriches the conceptual and experiential depth of exhibition practice, oriented toward social and cultural dimensions. In Chinese professional discourse, public art is often directly translated as “public participation”, a term widely used in the field of public policy to describe collective involvement in decision-making, intended to adjust and coordinate the nature of participation. Yet in the context of art-making, this can lead to confusion.
When public art integrates into its environment, attempting to purify its own vocabulary through environmental characteristics, the contextual depiction becomes relatively clear, and the work’s contours become self-evident. In essence, public art shares much in common with environmental art. The artist “intervenes” in the history and memory of a “place”, while the public “intervenes” in the unfolding of stories within that “place” — together enriching the curatorial narrative with new emotional resonance. A striking example is The Floating Piers (2014–2016) by Christo Jaracheff (1935–2020), installed on Italy’s Lake Iseo. Comprising 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes, each pier was approximately 16 meters wide, with a total length of nearly 3 kilometers and an overall area of 100,000 square meters. Along the yellow axis, the project connected the town of Sulzano to Monte Isola and the island of San Paolo, inviting visitors to walk upon the water, shifting their perceptions between land and lake, and leading visitors to re-experience the “spirit of place” of the towns through walking. The connected pathway allows visitors, under their self-recognition of time and space, to rediscover relationship with the indifferent mountain-and-lake town, binding past and present through sensory experience, and thereby expanding the contagion and resonance between the public and the place. This is an illustration of how the “creation of space” can transform an “environmental carrier” into a “place” for active artistic “intervention” — the kind of creative public participation that artists should embrace, rather than limiting involvement to lectures or souvenir giveaways.
During the December 2023 “Public Art Agency System Consultation Forum”, one curator stated: “On the subject of public participation, I’d like to say a bit more. Do museum exhibitions involve public participation? And if so, what kind? Then what kind of public participation should public art have? We should avoid unrealistic expectations. We must return to the roots of public art as stated in the Culture and Arts Reward and Promotion Act: our aim is to benefit artists and allow the public to access art.”5 My own view is that we're discussing public art, not contemporary curation in museums. The Culture and Arts Reward and Promotion Act cannot be meaningfully compared to the U.S. public art programs of 1933 designed to help artists survive the Great Depression —what is it really for? After all, given the contexts are vastly different, and the wheel of art history has turned many times since. In today’s public art market, with many already possessing private retreats and abundant resources, neither the government nor the public owes artists anything. The real question is: where are the “artists” who truly deserve to enter the “public realm”? I believe that allocating one percent of public building construction budgets to art should not be about simply benefiting artists, but about enabling bold creative acts — in the spirit of Lady Gaga’s lyric: “Let him try, to the sky…” In this way, the public can live in open environments where they encounter art with sincerity. (Perhaps, who knows — next year Lady Gaga might well receive the U.S. Treasury’s award for Best Public Art.)
You may disagree, but I truly believe this, and remain eager to see it realized.
1. Quoted from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Michael Gray, 2006, p.64.
2. https://publicart.moc.gov.tw/home/zh-tw/minute, Minutes of the meeting, December 1, 2023 (Friday), remarks by Committee Member I.
3. Quoted from North of England Civic Trust (A study of the Significance which the Angel of the North gains from its Setting), 2018, p.20.
4. Published in “In Search of Civic Aesthetics”: 2001 Public Art Forum in Taipei.
5. https://publicart.moc.gov.tw/home/zh-tw/minute, Minutes of the meeting, November 21, 2023 (Tuesday), remarks by the Organizing Unit.