The role of public art after the turn of the millennium is a result of a research project commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden by the Art History department at Södertörn University. The book departs from the complex situation that governs public art, permanent and temporary, whether commissioned and sanctioned by private or public funds or through on individual initiative. Art is discussed here as ongoing projects or discrete works of art, its function as value-creating, security-creating, commemorative as well as being part of short participation processes and/or acting over a long period of time.

This text discusses two Swedish art project/art groups: The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, founded in 1992 by artists Leif Elggren (born 1950) and Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956), and Association for Temporary Art [a:t], founded in 1993 by artists Karin Hansson (born 1967) and Åsa Andersson-Broms (then Åsa Andersson, born 1967). The Kingdoms of Elgaland Vargaland (which is a still on-going project) and [a:t] are highly relevant for an understanding of how artists during the 1990’s formed groups and contexts that balanced regular art exhibitions finding other sites for exposing and executing art projects, be it within the framework of corporate business, the Internet or by empowering the “citizens” of a Dual-Kingdom to conduct art works of their own. As this comparison will show, the paths chosen by the younger female artists and the older, more established males both run parallel and divert, and both could be understood as taking on a more vanguard position, deploying traditional avant-garde strategies of existing outside the art world. And yet, forming art groups could also be understood as an attempt to formulate an avantgarde position outside the logic that positions the rule-breaking individual avant-gardist artist and the solo exhibition at the core of an art system that builds careers and keeps the economy running.  Indeed, the relationship between the art market and the “new economy” was, as we shall see, one of the things that [a:t] set out to investigate.

Omförhandlingar: Den offentliga konstens roll efter millennieskiftet är ett resultat av en uppdragsforskning som Statens konstråd beställt av ämnet Konstvetenskap på Södertörns högskola. Antologin tar avstamp i den komplexa situation som omgärdar offentlig permanent och tillfällig konst, beställd och sanktionerad av privata eller offentliga medel, eller tillkommen på enskilda initiativ. Här diskuteras konstens roll som pågående projekt eller just konstverk, dess funktion som värdeskapande, trygghetsskapande, minnesmärke liksom som del av korta deltagandeprocesser och som verkande över lång tid.