Case Study 20.1: The Mural That Divided the City

Background

The city of Millbrook has a blank wall. It has been blank for eleven years — the side of a four-story parking structure on the main commercial street, visible from the town square, from the library steps, and from the small park where parents bring children on Saturday mornings. The wall is not an eyesore precisely; it is simply a gray absence, a dead space in the center of a city that is trying to reinvent itself after a decade of economic contraction.

The city council, after two years of planning, approves a public art initiative. A national competition produces three finalists. The winner is a forty-two-year-old muralist named Tavita Faleolo, born in Samoa, who has lived in Millbrook for fifteen years and whose work — large-scale, richly colored, formally complex — has appeared in public spaces in seven cities. Faleolo's proposal is called The River Remembers: a two-hundred-foot mural depicting the history of the Millbrook River watershed, from the Indigenous communities who lived along its banks through European settlement, industrialization, and the subsequent ecological damage and partial recovery. The imagery moves from left to right: at the left edge, the river is bright and alive, filled with fish and surrounded by Indigenous figures; at the right edge, the river is gray and industrial, but beginning to show signs of recovery at the far right corner.

The project is funded. Faleolo and a team of assistants spend four months on scaffolding. When the scaffolding comes down, the result is — by any measure of technical execution — extraordinary. The color is intense; the compositional complexity rewards repeated looking; the historical progression is legible and moving.

Half the city loves it.

The other half — or at least, a vocal portion of the other half — does not. Some find it ugly: too busy, too colorful, too political, not representative of "Millbrook's character." Some object to the historical narrative: they feel the mural is accusatory toward the city's European-descended founding families, whose names appear on some of the industrial imagery. Some simply say they didn't want "this kind of art" — they wanted something cheerful and welcoming, not something that required you to think about history. A city councilmember introduces a motion to commission a study of possible modifications or removal.

Faleolo states publicly: "The controversy is part of the work. Public art that makes everyone comfortable has already failed. The discomfort is a signal that the mural is doing something real."

The debate goes on for eight months. The mayor asks the philosophy department at the local college to prepare a brief analysis.

The Philosophical Questions

Can Beauty Be Legislated?

The question sounds absurd at first — obviously beauty cannot be legislated in any simple sense. But the question points toward something real: is there a legitimate role for democratic communities in making aesthetic decisions about shared public space?

Kant's analysis is instructive here. Aesthetic judgments, for Kant, claim universal assent but cannot be proven. When I say "the mural is beautiful," I am saying something more than "I like the mural" but less than "the mural has such-and-such measurable property that makes it beautiful by objective criteria." The implication for democratic aesthetics is uncomfortable: neither the people who love the mural nor the people who hate it can demonstrate that they are right in any way that would settle the dispute. Aesthetic disagreement is real and legitimate, and it doesn't have a factual resolution.

But this does not mean all aesthetic positions are equally well-founded. Kant distinguishes between "pure" aesthetic judgments (those that are genuinely grounded in disinterested contemplation of formal qualities) and "impure" or "dependent" judgments (those that are mixed with non-aesthetic concerns — moral reactions, personal associations, political commitments). By this analysis, some of the objections to Faleolo's mural are aesthetic and some are not. "The colors are too intense and the composition is too busy for a space of this scale" is an aesthetic claim that could be defended with reasons and that invites genuine aesthetic counter-argument. "I don't want to be reminded of what happened to the Indigenous community" is a moral and political discomfort that has been translated into an aesthetic objection. These are different kinds of claim, and they should be treated differently in public deliberation.

Dewey's Participatory Model

Dewey would approach this situation very differently from Kant. For Dewey, the most important question is not "is the mural beautiful?" but "what kind of community experience does it create?" Public art is not just an object to be appreciated by individuals; it is a form of shared, social, participatory experience. The mural's capacity to generate controversy — to make people stop, look, argue, read the newspaper, attend city council meetings, call talk radio — is itself a form of public esthetic experience in the Deweyan sense.

A mural that everyone walks past without noticing, that generates no conversation, that is immediately absorbed into the background — this is, by Deweyan criteria, a failed piece of public art, however technically accomplished it may be. A mural that makes half the city engaged and the other half angry has at least achieved something: it has made the public space publicly alive, has transformed a parking structure wall from a blank absence into an occasion for community reflection and argument.

Dewey would also be interested in the process of commissioning and discussing the mural, not just the object itself. A genuinely participatory public art process would involve the community not just as an audience but as co-creators — in defining the themes, reviewing the designs, and establishing the shared values that the art should reflect. The controversy over Faleolo's mural might partly reflect a procedural failure: the competition process may have been democratically legitimate (a national competition, professional jury, council approval) but not genuinely participatory in Dewey's deeper sense.

The Institutional Theory

If art-status is conferred by the artworld, then the dispute about whether The River Remembers is "really art" is, technically speaking, easily resolved: of course it is art. It was produced by a recognized artist, selected by a professional jury, commissioned by a public institution. Its art-status is not in doubt.

But this is unsatisfying. The community members who object are not — or not primarily — questioning whether the mural is art. They are questioning whether it is the right art for this space, whether it reflects their values, whether they should have to look at it every day. These are questions about the relationship between art and community that the institutional theory does not address.

The institutional theory illuminates a real feature of how the artworld works — art-status really is conferred, not just discovered — but it is not a complete philosophy of public art. Public art raises questions that purely private art does not: questions about common ownership of space, about the obligation to consider the responses of involuntary audiences (people who cannot choose not to see the mural), and about the relationship between artistic freedom and democratic accountability.

What Do Communities Owe Each Other Aesthetically?

This is the core normative question, and it does not have a simple answer. A few principles can be articulated:

Artistic freedom matters. The city made a professional judgment, through a legitimate process, in favor of a particular artist and a particular work. Intervening in the artistic content of a commission after the fact — because the community disagrees with the political message or finds the style uncomfortable — sets a precedent that will have a chilling effect on future artistic risk-taking. Public art that is guaranteed to offend no one will reliably produce very little of value.

Involuntary audiences matter. A painting in a private gallery is seen by people who chose to enter the gallery. A two-hundred-foot mural on the main street of a city is seen, repeatedly, by everyone who lives there. There is a legitimate question about what this difference requires. The right answer is probably not "the mural must please everyone" — that is an impossible standard that would prohibit virtually all serious public art. But it might be something like: public art commissions should be conducted with genuine community input, should be willing to revise or reconsider works that cause broad and deep offense, and should take seriously the specific character of specific places.

The discomfort argument deserves scrutiny. Faleolo's claim that "public art that makes everyone comfortable has already failed" is partly right and partly rhetorical. Art that challenges, unsettles, and complicates is often better art than art that comforts. But the claim can slide into a position that treats all objections to a work as evidence of its success — making the artist's choice immune to criticism. Not all discomfort is productive; not all challenge is artistically justified. The mural might be both genuinely excellent art and genuinely poorly calibrated for this specific community's specific wounds. These are not incompatible.

"I Find It Ugly" as a Reason for Removal

Is "I find it ugly" a sufficient reason to remove public art?

No — for reasons that Kant, Dewey, and even the institutional theory would agree on. Aesthetic preference, as distinct from aesthetic judgment, is not grounds for democratic veto. The community cannot require that all public art conform to the median aesthetic preference of the current population; doing so would impoverish public space and make it impossible for art to perform the function of challenging, expanding, and complicating community self-understanding.

But "I find it ugly" is not nothing, especially when it is widely shared and when it reflects something deeper than arbitrary preference — when, for instance, it reflects a genuine experience of alienation from the history depicted, a genuine sense that the formal language of the work does not resonate with the community's sense of itself, or a genuine aesthetic tradition that has different criteria from those the jury applied. These responses deserve respectful engagement, even if they do not constitute grounds for removal.

Questions for Discussion

1. Kant distinguishes between "pure" aesthetic judgments (disinterested contemplation of formal qualities) and objections rooted in moral or political discomfort. Can you clearly identify, from the case study, which objections to Faleolo's mural are aesthetic and which are moral/political? Does this distinction actually help resolve the dispute?

2. Dewey's emphasis on participatory, communal esthetic experience suggests that the process of making public art matters as much as the product. Design a public art commissioning process that is genuinely participatory in Dewey's sense. What are the tradeoffs between participation and professional judgment?

3. Faleolo says the controversy is "part of the work." Is this a philosophically defensible position? Can a work of art include its community response as an aesthetic element? Or is this a rhetorical move that protects the artist from legitimate criticism?

4. If the city council votes to remove the mural after eight months of controversy, is this a failure of democratic aesthetics or an exercise of legitimate democratic self-governance? What principles should govern this kind of decision?

5. Apply wabi-sabi principles: would a mural that embraced imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness — one that was designed to change over time, to weather, to incorporate the marks of the city's use of the space — have been received differently? Is permanence of public art a value, or an assumption that deserves examination?