Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’

This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the names of three neighborhood businesses woven into the scene.

The grant reviewers came back with one question: is this art, or is it signage? If it's signage, it isn't eligible, because commercial signs are funded under a different program, with different rules.

We had a long, heated meeting about it. Some neighbors said the business names made it advertising. The kids said the names were there because those shops are part of the neighborhood's story. One older man said the only question that mattered was whether people would stop and look at it.

I kept thinking of Dewey's Art as Experience (1934), which argues that art isn't a separate realm set apart in museums but grows out of ordinary experience made whole and meaningful. On Dewey's view, our mural is art if it does that for the people who live with it. But the grant form wanted a category, not an experience.

I notice that the question "is it art?" turned, within half an hour, into "is it good?" and "is it ours?" That might be the real lesson. I'm curious whether anyone has been through something similar and how you argued it.