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Taking a public phrase, created and upheld by the multitudes who echo it, and giving the
the privatizing glass of artistic glitter reeks of bad faith. This was the tone deaf fiasco of Bower's public black eye: taking something that was given to a public and collecting it as her work. Art, despite all its PR and back patting as a common good, is a privatized endeavor. Museums are behind paywalls, is a pony show of the elite. Art is not medicine, it is only sold as such. The monuments of art will never be as public as an actual class consciousness, as the public itself, which the phrase already was.
See too: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel