What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end of her term as vice-president in 2003 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This agency was founded in 1898 with an unusual brief: it does not initiate or design public art but rather reviews proposals for projects—ranging from mail boxes to paving to monuments and public buildings—to suggest modifications or “disapprove” designs. For the last one hundred years the ACNY has functioned as check, arbiter, voice of taste, and advocate of quality in the urban streetscape. Bogart describes its significance by noting that while New York is known by its landmarks, “the city’s streets and built environment are equally crucial in constituting the urban experience.” The Art Commission’s role has been to “force a range of authorities and interest groups to arrive at some consensus about what that experience should be like” (214).

The book combines a meticulous history researched in bureau archives with a participant-observer account of the author’s own years of service. The valuable illustrations, most never before published, include both vintage annotated pictures presented at the original hearings and the author’s lucid photographs of existing sites. The result is a quirkily partisan defense of the commission against both political detractors who consider it an encumbrance and more ideologically minded critiques of such bodies as instruments of state-sponsored hegemony and legitimation of power. In Bogart’s telling the commission emerges as a flawed but noble-minded effort that usually has advanced the greater public good.

Bogart’s prior writing prepared her for this civic as well as scholarly task. Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) was an important early cultural study of the City Beautiful Movement. It addressed themes of politics and power couched in detailed analyses of designs and the conflicts they engendered, as Bogart read between the lines of the day-to-day decision-making process to discern how New York’s elites attempted to create and preserve an image of civic unity and order in the face of an increasingly diverse urban population. Published during the “culture wars” of the 1980s, the book helped shape current scholarship on public art as a process of negotiation. It also explored the ideological basis of distinctions between “high” and “low” art, most memorably in a chapter on the sculptural ornament at Coney Island. Bogart interpreted the buxom statues there as examples of popular taste that subverted elite standards of classical beauty and the cultural hierarchy that supported them. The disturbance of cultural hierarchies continues in Bogart’s subsequent work, most recently an essay that makes a case for “Norman Rockwell as Public Artist” and which was published in the anthology The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Casey Nelson Blake, ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

How strange, then, in light of her frequent dismantling of the “borders” between fine and commercial art, that Bogart found herself calling for elite standards of quality and refinement in her role as art commissioner. In keeping with her earlier writing, The Politics of Urban Beauty explains the xenophobic desire to assert an exclusively Old School Anglo-Saxon image of “civilization” that informed early twentieth-century efforts at urban beautification. But it also sympathizes with the early commission’s high-minded hopes that an environment dedicated to beauty could enhance the lives of all citizens. A virtue of this book is that it quickly complicates such stereotypes. The attention to process that distinguishes all of Bogart’s work here produces painstaking readings of incident after incident where aesthetic rulings by the Art Commission attempted to reconcile broad urban tensions. Departing from the harsher calculus of power presented in her first book, Bogart moderates her analyses to consider aesthetic decisions less as power plays than as nuanced negotiations. Fascinating photographs of “also-ran” proposals that were not approved allow the reader to join in the process of distinction and judgment. We learn that although classical architecture may have been associated generally with power and civilization, not just any classical design would do: only after several rounds of submissions in 1906 for a new courthouse in Queens did the commission approve a design that tempered the excessive ornament and ungainly proportions proposed originally by the architect nicknamed “Rococo Coco.”

A rich chapter on monuments erected at the turn of the twentieth century reveals that the white power elite was riven not just by divisions between “swallowtails” and Tammany but also by passionate constituencies of grieving widows, German nationalists, and partisans of South American revolution, all of whom made claims for public commemoration. The dispute surrounding the allegorical sculpture of Civic Virtue that Bogart discussed in her first book is recounted here not as a failure to assert control over popular taste, but rather as a story of the beleaguered commission’s effort to preserve aesthetic standards and its own independence from elites, politicians, and the public alike. We learn that the commission itself found this particular design absurd and only approved it to appease the well-connected artist and his group of supporters. Bogart’s newfound empathy for the commission, however, does not entirely preclude political critique, as seen in her discussion of efforts to redecorate the Federal-era Governor’s Room in City Hall: she concludes that the noble cause of historic preservation served less to restore the room to “federal-era splendor” than to assert a taste whose visual restraint stood for upper-class moral ideals.

At first the seemingly slow pace of the book appears to undercut its provocative subheadings that promise a bigger picture than the detailed case studies deliver. A section titled “The Arts of Urban Sight,” for example, is mainly a discussion of the logistics of locating street signs and letterboxes. Bogart’s aims parallel those of the commission itself, which “seek[s]—not always successfully—to assess the merits of submissions on a case-by-case basis rather than in terms of the broader urban or political implications” (213). What emerges is an argument for the study of public art as a form of political process. Conflict, negotiation, and compromise, more than any one artist’s design, become the shaping factors in art and, by implication, in civic life itself. The same standards of moderation and subtlety that Bogart attributes to her progressive-era predecessors come to characterize this book.

Throughout she extols the wisdom of refinement, complexity, and “restraint”—elsewhere described as the rejection of “the cute”—that have guided the ACNY’s decisions since its inception. We see these judgments in a section on the memorial to the sinking in 1904 of the passenger ship The Slocum whose thousand-plus victims constituted the worst civilian disaster in New York City before the World Trade Center deaths in 2001. Bogart defends the commission’s rejection of the initial relief, which would have depicted a family on shore watching the sinking ship, and explains that the final design showing only the profiles of children gazing into a vague distance was the more “timeless” choice. This aesthetic which suppresses narrative and elevates the general over the specific was challenged by a new conception of activist art during the New Deal era and La Guardia administration, but returns to inform later chapters.

As the story approaches the present and the author enters as an actor, the writing becomes more barbed. The final chapter’s sarcastic tone and bitter assessments reveal Bogart’s frustrations with the struggles her fellow commissioners faced to maintain the ACNY’s traditionally disinterested high ground in light of unfortunately literal trends in art and constant pressure from politicians to dumb down designs and favor pet interests. She acknowledges that to some extent the problems that beset the commission resulted from positive forces of democratization as residents of New York’s outer boroughs, who did not share the commission’s educated aesthetics, began to claim representation in the urban landscape. Her harshest critique, however, is reserved for former mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Not only was his personal taste deplorable (cf., his idea for a “preposterous” statue of Frank Sinatra that would have piped recorded music from its pedestal)—even worse was his high-handed disregard for the commission’s expertise and for the political process itself. Increasingly lengthy captions and endnotes recount the author’s thwarted efforts to modify designs toward the standards of subtlety, elegance, and restraint that inspired her predecessors. Drawing parallels between postmodernism’s return to figurative imagery and commercial “branding,” she accuses Giuliani’s group of ill-serving the public by covering the city with logos and simplifying history. A devastating critique of a statue of the sled-dog Togo that bypassed the Art Commission’s review and was erected in Seward Park in 1999 at the whim of the parks commissioner concludes by noting that dogs now urinate on the monument. More seriously, Bogart recounts the commission’s approval of 9/11 monuments they personally found “hackneyed” because the designs meant so much to local communities.

These pointed chapters clearly move beyond the calm review of change over time promised in the book’s introduction. They build to a plea for attention to the urban environment that lives up to the commission’s original promise. At no point does Bogart call for an alternative system of design review or propose a specific formula for public art. It is thus productive to read this book alongside more general but overtly programmatic studies of public art, including Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen (New York: Vintage, 2007) and the anthology The Arts of Democracy mentioned above. Where Kammen celebrates dispute over art as a democratic process, and Blake’s authors call for community-based designs, Bogart makes a more measured case for expertise and public service. The Politics of Urban Beauty’s single flaw is that the book so often holds back from placing individual controversies into national or artistic contexts. For example, the type of figurative sculpture and labeling pushed during the Giuliani administration could be read not simply as bad taste but as part of a worldwide reaction against abstract monumental sculpture, with its own rationale and support. The debates surrounding Tilted Arc offer one example of questions about the suitability of avant-garde designs for public monuments. Rather than engage in such polemic, Bogart’s book provides nuance and historical specificity. The author sticks close to her documents, which yield riches indeed.