Agenda - Parks and Recreation Commission - 01/09/2025

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construct their individual and collective reality. She writes, "For us, appearance-something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves-constitutes reality." Further, it is the "presence of other who see what we see and hear what we hear (that) assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves . . . "(Arendt 1958, p.50) Second, she says that the term "public" describes "the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it." (Arendt 1958, p.52) Public art, thereby, is one of the things in our world that we share in common. She states that, "to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those that sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time." (Arendt 1958, p.52) By sharing the viewing of public art together, we all collectively `sit at the same table' and bring our individual private perspectives at the same time. Art creates the public environment that is respectful of individual interpretations of the common world that surrounds us. Art literature also refers to the concept of"public sphere" developed by Jurgen Habermas (1962). He describes the public sphere consisting of a body of private people that come together to rationally discuss common interests. Erica Doss (1995) invokes Habermas in her discussion of public culture, describing it as an ideal and detached realm distinct from the real-life tensions of politics, economics, and social difference. This model was viewed as a utopian and fictitious viewpoint that would rarely, if ever, be achieved in a capitalistic society that embraced consumerism, mass media, and corporate influence. Habermas (1962) argued that the advent of consistent political debate that characterized the American democracy of the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in consensus, not compromise. This consensus of public opinion would then influence the actions of the state and could not be ignored. The model relied on the assumption 30