Lisa Lynch's "Culturing the Pleebland" told may tales and made a lot of interesting assertions. It was an engaging article, but I could not help but think that her criticisms of the Paradise Now exhibition were a defense for artists who seemed to have failed to get their point across (especially during her description of the reverse-bred frogs project and "One Tree"). However, it seems that many other critics, including prominent newspaper editors, were disappointed with the show as well, so surely something was amiss. The title alone of Jeremy Rifkin's January 2003 article in London's The Guardian asserts her opinion: "Dazzled by the science: Biologists who dress up eugenics as a new art form are dangerously deluded".

More to the point of the article, however, is Lynch's discussion of the public identity and its role in the exhibition (as well as Eduardo Kac's "GFP Bunny" and the Steve Kurtz legal battle). She especially focuses on the "illusion of unity among people who [...] rightly belong on opposite sides," which she quotes Bruce Robbins as saying in his work The Phantom Public Sphere (4). Going even deeper, she discusses the different ways that individuals and organizations treat this "public", some working from the idea that the public shares some common narrative or common good (the social scientists), others believing that the public lacks an understanding of higher concepts, especially in regard to science (the natural scientists, and still others treating the public as a mass of citizens which must be sheltered and protected against some perceived danger in genetic art (the "government lawyers" in the Kurtz case).

Through this article, I found that the once convenient term "public" was just as unstable in its meaning and usage as any other blanket signifier we have studied this term. It had once seemed a pleasing term in its general harmlessness, being all-inclusive, never exclusive or even definitive enough to become offensive. But Lynch argues that it is exactly this vague broadness that inhibits effective dialogue with any "public", especially in regards to the Paradise Now exhibit. She argues that the curators' failure was to address one single, all-inclusive public and not the multiple publics of an "increasingly complex world". (24)

Between Judith Butler's arguments against blanket terms that are too restricting and therefore oppressive (such as "woman") and Lynch's argument against definitions that are too lose, it seems that today's art critics are just impossible to please!





1. Lynch, Lisa. “Culturing the Pleeband: The Idea of the ‘Public’ In Genetic Art”. Project Muse: Scholarly Online Journals. 24 March 2010.

2. Robbins, Bruce. “The Public As Phantom.” In The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U Minn Press, 1993, vii–xxvi.