Ontological metamorphoses in the street: how street and official public art can metaphysically transform into each other

Beginning with the recognition that street art and official public art are genuinely distinct, opposing art kinds—the former constitutively driven by social subversion and the latter by programmatic civic integration—this article challenges a widely held, implicit premise among public art theorists: that an artwork’s categorization within this taxonomy is permanently fixed at the time of production. By examining the trajectories of prominent public artworks, including the heritagization of Banksy’s Migrant Child and the popular recoding of Visbal’s Fearless Girl, I argue that shifts in public attitudes and tracking practices toward a work cannot be dismissed as mere interpretative variance. Instead, they represent genuine ontological metamorphoses. Drawing on Ásta’s conferralist framework of social ontology, I show that street art and official public art are conferred social categories whose assignment is contingent on the context-bound tracking practices of evaluating publics. Finally, rather than treating public friction as an administrative nuisance, I investigate the emancipatory potential of this ontology in the context of cultural policy and urban governance. I introduce the concept of ontological superposition to theorize structural deadlocks in which an artwork is concurrently sustained in conflicting categories by competing publics. Consequently, this model deprives top-down institutional mandates of their perceived “natural” authority and returns aesthetic determination—in a Rancièrian sense—to the city’s inhabitants.