Late Kester Response.

This particular reading was hard to get thorough. At first it felt like a simple list of interesting examples of new takes on public and community art. It was not until Kester began to really dive into Dawn Dedeaux's project that I really was able to get a good look at the issues he was highlighting. The problem of someone coming from the outside a community to make a piece of work about that community and display that publicly. There is merit in Dedeaux's work involving a community in its creation however I was disturbed by this woman's motives for creating the work. A nice sentiment of nursing her own prejudices but I think that this particular self interested agenda would have inevitably saturated the work. We look at Kester's word on it,

"Hardy and the young prisoners with whom she worked provided Dedeaux's with a kind of therapeutic resource, allowing her to reestablish an ethical equilibrium following gut is empowerment and self-doubt catalyzed by her muggings." p.143

Of course the understanding of art from the outside can always be taken in a extremely critical fashion and without seeing the artwork myself it is hard for me to make any real comment. That said, in Kester's article it was hard to find the real community benefits to the work other than the soothing of the artist's discomforts regarding being mugged