The component I would like to add to this equation is the fantasy that the audience constructs about the artist. To delineate between this fantasy of artist and the real person who makes cultural products, the unweildy term cultural producer has enjoyed some currency in recent debates. While not ideal, I'll use it here for the purposes of argument. In the audience's construction of the artist the work that is produced is perceived as the product jointly of innate talent and play. This permits it to be read as having appeared without labour, and as mysteriously significant - it is not the product of work, but of talent, and is therefore a mystery.
Cultural producers work like anyone else.
They study to acquire the skills they use and in the final analysis, they want their work acknowledged and respected in the same way as anyone else does. Eventually they want it assessed as work not play. What public art requires is for both audience and cultural producer to acknowledge the fantasies they have entertained about one another's roles, and to attempt to move around these stereotypical ideas to a more open-minded space where a connection which means more than reiterating stale positions is possible. It should be remembered that the art is the opening gambit in a dialogue with the public which, in the moment of response emerges as that real measurable body - the audience. Such a situation is dynamic and potentially volatile.