Contemporary public art is still in the process of defining its artistic and legal identity. Indeed to juxtapose the terms public and artis a paradox. Art is often said to be the individual inquiry of the sculptor or painter, the epitome of self-expression and vision that may challenge conventional wisdom and values. The term public encompasses a reference to the community, the social order, self-negation: hence the paradox of linking the private and the public in a single concept. A goal of any general or jurisprudential theory concerning government sponsorship or ownership of art in the public context must reconcile, through state institutions and law, this tension between art's subjectivity with its potential for controversy and government's need to promote the public good.

This essay critically examines and discusses existing contemporary legal doctrine and its failure to accommodate or even adequately define the issues and competing values at stake in the public art context. Such failure may be attributed in part to the fact that neither legal theory nor art policy have been inspired by the vision of or located in the broader context of a sociopolitical public realm. (p. 113-114)