How long does a public art commission take? Eighteen months is normal
A public art commission takes eighteen months from the decision to commission to the handover of the finished work, and that is a normal length for a permanent commission of almost any size. A small temporary work can be delivered in four to six months. A landmark work tied to a major infrastructure or regeneration site takes three to five years, because it moves at the speed of the construction programme rather than its own. The eighteen month figure is not a convention borrowed from anywhere; it is what the stages add up to when each one is given the time it actually needs.
The eighteen month schedule, stage by stage
The schedule below sets each stage of a public art commission against a working duration for a permanent outdoor work in the UK. Add the midpoints of stages 1 to 8 and the total is 78 weeks, which is eighteen months. The ninth stage runs after handover and does not sit inside that total.
| Stage | What has to finish before it starts | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Decision, funding and governance | Nothing; this is the start | 4 to 12 weeks |
| 2. Brief and budget | Committed funding and a named approver | 6 to 10 weeks |
| 3. Selection | A published brief with criteria and weightings | 10 to 16 weeks |
| 4. Concept design and proposal | An appointed artist on a development fee | 6 to 12 weeks |
| 5. Contract | An approved concept and an agreed cost | 3 to 6 weeks |
| 6. Detailed design, engineering and consents | A signed agreement | 8 to 16 weeks |
| 7. Fabrication | Consents granted and a fabricator instructed | 12 to 30 weeks |
| 8. Site preparation and installation | A finished work and an available site | 1 to 4 weeks |
| 9. Handover, defects period and evaluation | Installation complete and signed off | 12 months after handover |
The lower bound of the whole sequence is 50 weeks and the upper bound is 106, which is the honest way to state it. A commissioner planning to the 50 week figure is planning for a project in which nothing is queried, no consent is refused, no committee meeting is missed and no fabricator is busy.
Why the size of the work barely changes the length
Size changes the fabrication stage and almost nothing else. A two metre sculpture and a five metre sculpture need the same decision, the same brief, the same selection process, the same contract, the same planning application and the same eight or thirteen week determination period. Only the making and the lifting scale with the object.
What does change the length is the number of parties with a say. A commission with one landowner, one funder and one approver runs to the lower half of every band. A commission with a council, a developer, a highways authority, a conservation officer and a residents’ group runs to the upper half of all of them, because each party’s review is a queue and the queues are sequential rather than parallel.
What actually adds months
Five things add months to a public art commission, and none of them is the artist working slowly.
- Consent periods. The statutory determination period for a minor planning application in England is eight weeks and thirteen weeks for a major one; in Scotland the equivalent periods are two months and four months. Those clocks start when the application is validated. Listed building consent, scheduled monument consent or a highways licence run on their own timetables and can run consecutively rather than together.
- Committee cycles. A decision that needs a committee waits for the committee. Many councils and boards meet every six or eight weeks, and missing a papers deadline by two days costs the full cycle.
- Fabrication lead times. Bronze foundries, architectural glass makers, specialist stone yards and powder coaters all queue behind other clients. A slot booked in advance is worth more than a discount.
- Ground investigation. Finding an unrecorded service, contamination or made ground under the site sends the foundation design back to the engineer, and the engineer is usually working on something else by then.
- Weather and season. Concrete pours, external paint, resin and some finishes have temperature and humidity limits. A mural that slips from September to November has slipped to March.
The four to six month temporary commission
A temporary commission compresses to four to six months by removing the two longest items rather than by hurrying anybody. Temporary work that is not fixed to the ground, does not alter a building and is removed within a short period frequently needs no planning permission, though this depends on what it is, where it stands and how long it stays, and the local planning authority is the only body that can confirm it. Removing the consent stage takes eight to sixteen weeks out of the programme immediately.
The second saving is fabrication. Temporary work in timber, textile, print, light, sound or performance is made in weeks rather than months and needs no foundation design. What does not compress is selection: an open call still needs advertising time, reading time and a panel date, and rushing that stage is where a temporary commission most often produces a disappointing field.
Sequencing against a construction programme
Commissions attached to a building or a public realm scheme are governed by the construction programme, and the art timetable has to be read backwards from it. Two dates matter more than the rest. The first is the point at which foundations, ducting and power for the artwork must be built into the groundworks, which typically falls a year or more before the artwork itself is ready, and missing it means digging up finished paving later at the commission’s expense. The second is practical completion, because a site handed over to occupiers is no longer a construction site with cranes and closures on it.
Where the money comes through a planning obligation under Section 106 in England and Wales or Section 75 in Scotland, the agreement often ties the art to a trigger such as occupation of a certain number of units. That trigger is a hard deadline with a legal consequence, and it is the first thing to establish before writing any programme.
What to fix before the clock starts
Four dates belong in the agreement rather than in an email, because each one is a point at which the programme can quietly stop. Fix the date by which the commissioner must respond to a submitted design, because an open-ended approval period is where months disappear without anyone deciding to spend them. Fix the site availability window for installation. Fix the payment milestones, since a fabricator will not start without a deposit and an artist cannot carry one. And fix what happens if a consent is refused, including who has already been paid for what.
Eighteen months is a long time for a school, a small trust or a first-time commissioner to hold attention on one project. The practical answer is not to shorten the programme but to name the person who owns it from stage one through to the maintenance schedule, and to accept that the periods of apparent inactivity, waiting for a determination, waiting for a committee, waiting for a foundry slot, are the programme rather than a failure of it.