The powers that be have invariably commissioned monuments in which art was placed at the service of their own legitimization. By erecting monuments in the most prominent sites of the urban landscape, they benefited through aesthetic means. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that artists began rebelling against this approach and challenged the classic forms of monumental sculpture, first by deforming the figure, then by abstraction. It seemed that sculpture could thus resist being used as an instrument by political powers, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Abstraction and any other kinds of sculptural language adapted perfectly to the logic of monuments, which continued to work just as effectively. There is no need for the historic figure: just the aura of an abstract artwork, bereft of content, now provides sufficient prestige to the government that erects it or the bank that pays for it. In short, public sculpture has lost much of its ability to resist this drive to capitalize on common spaces: it either surrenders itself to it or becomes urban furniture. Thus when the ENPAP states that it does not subscribe to the logic of monuments, it is helping to provide a more accurate definition of what should be understood by public art. This might help to make the concept say more than it actually does, while also restricting the scope of what it means. But a further step is needed to understand just where this leads.

As I stated earlier, not all the art that is outside traditional art institutions is public art in the sense that we are referring to here. Monuments, for example, are not in this category. It is important, however, to realize that there is another vast body of art that does not come under that heading: all the genres that make use of aesthetic media to derive maximum private economic benefit from common urban spaces. This can happen in several ways: an aesthetic medium can be used as a publicity stunt to boost sales of a product or service, or can help to raise land values in an urban regeneration project, or take the form of a cultural event to attract tourism. In such cases art is used as a means of marketing a common space, i.e. convert it into a good whose exchange generates financial benefit. In keeping with this logic, the medium of art should help increase the flow of consumers to shopping malls, of visitors to tourist destinations, or of well-heeled city dwellers to a recently gentrified neighborhood, and through such flows generate financial benefits to investors. When any kind of artistic manifestation bows down to these –or similar—aims, it works as an exotic lubricant for mechanisms that generate capital. There is a name for this, and it is not "public art": it is called marketing. It is obvious that the ENPAP organizations do not view their work as marketing. Suffice it to recall that, according to Claire Doherty, public art should be committed to engaging in a critical shakeup of the place and community where it is produced.

As we can see therefore, the location of "public space" (understood as "outside a gallery or museum") is not enough to define public art; there are at least two other aesthetic forms of expression that share it, these being monuments and certain kinds of marketing. In the final analysis, these two ways of intervening in a "public space" work very similarly: they appropriate a common space using aesthetic media to generate political or financial capital. To use Hardt and Negri’s apt distinction, marketing works for the private sphere and monuments for the public sphere, whereas the art we seek to define here falls into the remaining category, which is the common sphere. This brings to light the deceptive connotation of the word "public". We forget that what is public is as much a form of property as what is private, and that although public property theoretically belongs to all, it is often used by public servants for their own gain. They are the ones who personally benefit from the prestige generated by the logic of monuments and turn it into political capital. As for marketing, the name itself shows that its purpose is to produce financial gain. In both cases a common good –the urban landscape, social relations in a neighborhood or an art language, for instance—is appropriated by a minority for its benefit. In these times in which Europeans are watching their representatives dismantle the welfare state, it is interesting to see the enthusiasm with which what is public collaborates in the appropriation of what is common for private ends. "Public" should therefore not be the adjective used to describe a form of art that runs counter to the logic of monuments and marketing. This should be an art of the common– what we share coherently in common.