User:Brittanylutge0/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Public art - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I feel as though public art is a concept that can be quite misunderstood and is overlooked. As the artwork is on public display, depending on the location thousands of people see this artwork yet have no clue as to what it pertains to. Reading it I wanted to see if there was more context to public art as a means of expression. Public art can express a variety of things which can easily be overlooked. My first reaction was that the article was quite short in length. The content categories within the article were of good choice but could use more examples.

Evaluate the article
Starting with the introduction of the article, it was straight to the point. The information provided fits the description of public art although I feel as though the portion about independent art could have been added into another category (possibly controversies) or just omitted completely. While it is useful to know, it is not necessary in the introduction paragraph. After the introduction, the article segways straight into characteristics of public art which was a smart choice in terms of sequence of information. It helps give the reader an idea of what to look for in examples, and provides insight of this artistic expression straight away.

While that area of the article is sufficient, the actual content could use a bit of editing. The content is not up-to-date, with sources dating anywhere from 2003 to 2015. There is also a warning before the “history” segment and onward letting the reader know that the information does not represent a “worldwide view” of the subject. The context of public art in relations to other countries, races, or genders is slim to none highlighting mostly movements from the East Coast of the United States.

Furthermore, there are even more contextual issues. Firstly, when talking about sustainability in public art the media image provided was of artist Ron Finley in one of his public food gardens. This example shows no real artwork, just the artist. Also they state “sustainability has been widely adopted in many environmental planning and engineering projects '' which is vague and could be worded in a way that relates public art to environmental and engineering projects. They state in a separate category that “the term ‘curated public art’ is used to define the way of producing public art that significantly takes into account the context, the process and the different actors involved. It defines itself slightly differently from top-down approaches of direct commissioning” with no citation. This reads more of the author's interpretation, which is fine but needs citing as to how they got that conclusion.

A typo was spotted, shown in this paragraph “For the first, significant examples of these prospective manners of commissioning art projects have been established by the Public Art Fund launched by Doris C. Freedman in 1977, with a new approach in the way the percent for art was used, or the public art funds of Geneva with the Neon Parallax project involving a very large urban environnement in 2005”. Along with the typo, this sentence could be revised more, as the wording becomes muddled. Also, the link to “Neon Parallax” no longer exists assuming the link if out of date.

Aside from these issues, the tone of the article was neutral and was not trying to persuade the reader of thinking a certain way. The only example of a bias I could find was “according to the curator and art/architecture historian, Mary Jane Jacob, public art brings art closer to life” while this quote is endearing this feels like a bias as it is evident the author supports this quote, yet Jacob’s is stating this is as an observation and interpretation.

The sources of this article were quite old. While there were a few reputable sources cited there were plenty that were not. There are a variety of random outlets the author pulled from: radio stations, artist websites, landscape magazines to name a few. The links to the articles seemed to work and did provide information about public artwork but the websites do not really show a diverse spectrum of authors as it was mostly artists themselves or miscellaneous journalists. An area that could use more examples are controversies. While it is important to highlight this, the provided artworks only had a sentence or two of context. It would be more helpful if there was more written than just what the artwork is and who created it. The media was visually appealing, besides sustainability like stated earlier, and were well-captioned and were laid right next to the appropriate paragraph.

Most of the conversations on the talk page were on how the sources were not credible enough. People mentioned that they wanted more clarity on a few of the topics touched on in the article because of the fact that the sources were quite random. The article is rated a C-, meaning the information is substantial but overall needs more. It could be beneficial to add even more examples of artwork, biggest public art landmarks, and clearer writing about its history. It is a shorter article so as it touches on the basics it needs that substance to be considered detailed. Overall, the strengths of this article were that there were multiple categories which talked about movements involving public art and touching on the foundation of public art. Although, it is underdeveloped and needs more information added to its history and provide more examples of specific artworks and artists coming out of not only the movements but out of public art as a whole. Lastly, the main reworking is due to lack of credible sources.