After the Courtship, is the love lost?….The engagement of art and architecture in Queensland’s Art Built-in

Queensland public art, and specifically the public art produced under Art Built-in, has been seen to be ‘dumbed down’ with a preference for art in the public domain that is not critically-engaged. The government client-commissioner within the supposedly democratic art-by-committee process often expects the artwork to represent government values and to be content-free and risk-free with the intention of avoiding controversy. With the demise of Art Built-In in 2006, Arts Queensland has put in place a new strategy – ‘art + place’. In terms of criticality in public art practice—has Queensland public art improved? In this paper, case study projects commissioned by the Department of Justice and Attorney General will be reviewed to provide a critical analysis of the development in Queensland’s government-commissioned public art