Seoul’s Artworks for Buildings Review Minutes

<p dir="ltr">This study aims to empirically examine the evaluative perspectives and criteria used in Seoul’s Artworks for Buildings Review and to identify the structural gap between the system’s public-art objectives and the actual practices observed in deliberation. To achieve this goal, all 19 rounds of review committee minutes from 2024 to 2025 were analyzed based on the Enforcement Decree of the Culture and Arts Promotion Act and the relevant Seoul Metropolitan Government Ordinance. A set of 16 analytical categories was developed by expanding the official evaluation rubric, and every deliberation statement was coded at the sentence level for subsequent statistical and content analysis. The findings indicate that the review process prioritizes external factors such as formal aesthetics and visual harmony, while essential public-art values including citizen accessibility, cultural engagement, sense of place, and contributions to the urban environment receive relatively limited attention. The analysis further reveals that the review documents focus heavily on formal and technical information, which restricts the integration of public-oriented evaluative perspectives. The composition of committee expertise and the manner in which deliberations proceed also reinforce visually centered judgments. These results highlight the need to revise review criteria, broaden the informational scope of review documents, and diversify evaluative perspectives to strengthen the public-art orientation of the system. The study provides empirical evidence that can inform future improvements to public art review frameworks.</p>