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Coastal cities have increasingly welcomed initiatives for producing temporary urban art spaces to lure tourists and revitalize the local economy. This article examines the under-explored contested relationships between a major temporary art event and social (dis)engagement in the context of coastal urban regeneration. During the pop-up art event Dismaland (2015), led by the reputed graffiti artist Banksy and company, the coastal resort of Weston-super-Mare in England experienced an upsurge of international visitors. Banksy envisaged this “Bemusement Park”, situated in an abandoned lido, as an antagonist twist of Disneyland and the commercial modus operandus of theme parks. Drawing on discourse analysis of expert and public perspectives and auto-ethnographic experience, this article challenges the experienced extent of antagonistic art practice in juxtaposition to the formal discourse of creators and urban policymakers. The examination of the event's artistic, behavioral, spatial and temporal frameworks shows how it ambiguously navigated between authentic and engineered trajectories of involving its target audiences. The creators' anarchist plea for radical change was ambivalently met with appreciation of an urban art space for serious contemplation as well as a perceived lack of local community investment – the latter rendering Dismaland an urban ‘art colony’ that fostered an elitist global art market rather than urban-citizen-led participation. The in-depth case study concludes that greater attention, both in urban policy and scholarship, is needed to the implications of the production of temporary urban art spaces for immediate inclusive engagement with end users as well as sustained community development. The study particularly calls for caution in assuming inclusive community benefits of art-led regeneration as abundantly ascribed in creative city theories and urban policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural policy has produced divergent intentions underlying the direction of public art since its advent in Western Europe in 1945. Literature has feebly demonstrated the extent to which differentialities in cultural policy have affected the production of public artworks over time and space. This paper fills this gap as regards Amsterdam and Ghent, cities that are situated in different national institutional contexts. It shows dissimilarity—in that one finds a relatively higher number of public artworks, more spatially dispersed and more diversified public artworks in Amsterdam than in Ghent, which is particularly a result of institutional differences—and similarity between these cities, in terms of initiatives by local communities and arts actors, irrespective of the local policy context. These results provide insight into policy concern with public-art production and the everyday practices and cultural traditions that underpin it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]