You Call That Art? TV program premiers in Seattle

Just an artist on a Harley, traveling and talking about art

By Nancy Wick

University Week

View a preview of You Call That Art?!

John Young has a vision of what happens when Joe Citizen encounters a piece of public art, especially if it looks more like the Broken Obelisk than the George Washington statue. Joe, Young thinks, is likely to turn to his companion, jerk a thumb at the piece and say, “You call that art?”

Which is why, when he decided to put together a TV program about public art, Young named it You Call That Art?!. The program debuted at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22, on KCTS-9.

Young, a UW professor of art, will host the program, which is appropriate, since he has specialized in public art and about a dozen of his own pieces are placed in the

“There’s very little effort going on to educate the public about art,” Young said. “The TV show is all about trying to demystify public art for the common man.”

The show is, in fact, an offshoot of a course that Young has been teaching at the University for years. Officially it’s called Field Study in Public Art, but because it involves getting into vans and touring local public art, the students call it Van Go. Young takes them to particular pieces of public art and talks about the art’s origins, what the artists have said is the intent and who funded them. Sometimes the artist meets them on site and talks about his or her work.

Seattle, Young said, is an ideal place for the course, because it boasts more public art per capita than any other American city — more than 400 pieces outdoors and perhaps 1,600 inside buildings. The proliferation is the result of the multiple arts commissions that cover this region. There’s the city arts commission, called the Office of Arts and Culture; the King County Arts Commission, which is 4Culture; the Washington State Arts Commission, which includes the pieces built on the UW campus and the federal arts commission, the National Endowment for the Arts. Read more here.