Public Art as Property: On the Ideologies of Permanence in Canadian Public Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I consider how the field of public art in Canada has been shaped under municipal and developer-led policies that demand permanence. I look in particular to the municipality of Toronto, which, perhaps more than other cities in Canada, has been more rigidly attached to permanent forms of public art. Theoretically, I examine how scholars across disciplines, from art history, urban studies, performance theory and settler colonial studies, have variously approached the topic of permanence—a concept that is often taken for granted as an inherent part of the field yet remains undertheorized. While many writers have importantly addressed the inequities of urban public space amidst gentrification, development and displacement in the 1980s and 1990s, existing work on public art in Canada and the United States rarely addresses the context of settler colonialism. As such, I bring existing studies on public art in dialogue with contemporary critiques of settler place-making in public space. I further draw on performance studies’ deep critiques of the western attachment with the permanent object and document, bringing this discipline’s work on the permanent versus the ephemeral to bear on public art’s reliance on permanence. Through these lenses, I aim to unpack the ideologies embedded in permanence and rationales for the widespread adoption of permanent public art. In the concluding sections, I question whether permanent public art can be truly ethical or compatible with efforts to support diverse and democratic societies in settler colonial states and look to artists who have directly undermined the supposed power of permanence with their work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".