If you need the website, it is not public art

I have been working on several web-based projects recently. Thinking about how the web shapes access, who it serves, who it leaves out, and also building some things of my own. So when I find myself asking whether a sculpture needs a website to justify its existence, the question feels less like art criticism and more like something I have been circling for a while now.

I wrote some time back about how the Gibbs Farm collection, with massive sculptures set amid rolling green hills, is open to the public a few times a year. It is a generous project, and I genuinely admire it. But something has been nagging at me recently, some of the sculptures in public spaces do not make sense unless you have already read about them.

Not in an “I do not get abstract art” way. I am fine with ambiguity. I am fine with not knowing what an artist intended. What I am less fine with is standing in front of a large-scale public work and feeling like I have walked into the middle of someone’s murder mystery, only to have nobody hand me the case file.

There is a version of this problem that lives in galleries, too, but galleries have walls, labels, docents, and context built into the architecture. You expect to do some work there. Public art operates on different terms. It meets people where they are, on sidewalks, in parks, on large green pastures. It does not assume its audience has done homework.

I keep coming back to a simple test: if a sculpture in a public space requires a website to be understood, who is it actually for? The artist? The commissioner? The small circle of people who already know the references? That is not public art. That is private art with outdoor seating.

And look, I understand that art does not owe anyone simplicity. But they also need to do something physically in the space that you can feel before you read a single word about them. You do not need the explanation to have the experience. The explanation deepens what is already there.

The sculptures that lose me are those where the experience doesn’t start until the explanation arrives. Where you are standing out there, looking at a thing, and you feel nothing. Not confusion, not wonder, not even discomfort. Just blankness. Actually, not even blankness, not even a void. And then you pull up the website, and suddenly it is about displacement , and you think: sure, but none of that was there with me.

Art needs to do more of its own work. That trusts the body, the eye, the gut before it trusts the words.