The research deals with public art, and its related discourses. The particular focus of the paper is on investigating how public art can be a resistant or controversial part of the urban space. The first part of the paper describes the historic development of public art through time. Subsequently, the discussion goes on to the main aspects which dominate art in the public, urban space. We focus on the site-specificity realm, sculpture and installation, the role of public art in urban regeneration as well as influences in society. Today, it is argued that public art shifts its focus from object to process, from artist to audience, and that the artwork becomes part of city development policies, approaches to people’s everyday life. Currently the quest of contemporary public art becomes one of the main subjects to explore and find definitions for. The methodology used in this paper is descriptive, based in a historical point of view. The aim of this research is to find out the main development lines of public art, trying to answer questions such as: how is public art expressed in the urban space realm? What is its potential?

The main aim of this paper was to investigate the development of art for the public space as a result of the historical impact through which the artworks have been evaluated. The context of social, ideological and economical changes is related. The author examined principal art practices in the public domain and discussed the main types of artworks created for the public space in Latvia in the period between 1980 and 2010. Seven art events were selected to analyze the main occurrence of historic periods as certain paradigms. Empirical and qualitative data collection methods were used to clarify the development of art for the public space in the Latvian landscape taking into account the historical point of view. According to the typology of artworks the following features were investigated: the aim, the location, the form and the size, and the function of artworks. The majority of art for the public space occurred in the city environment and the financial support of the project played an important role.

The culture industry and its human resources have been little researched in Latvia, yet research on the culture industry is important, because the industry makes a significant contribution to economic growth by promoting employment and the development of competitive regions. The culture industry encompasses libraries, folk art, theatre, music, museums, the creative industry and other sub-industries, yet in recent years those working in all the culture subindustries faced various challenges, including: a low remuneration and insufficient monetary and non-monetary bonuses, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a high personnel turnover. Accordingly, the aim of the research is to develop recommendations for hiring and retaining human resources by examining challenges in managing human resources in the culture industry. The authors conducted a survey among the personnel of the Board of Culture of Jelgava municipality. The survey found that the main challenges faced by the administration of the Board of Culture were an uncompetitive remuneration, the aging of the personnel and generational change as well as inefficient and insufficient motivation for working. The research has developed two scenarios for recruiting: ‘promotion of creativity and non-monetary motivation’ that aim to publicly appreciate human resources, so that they would feel important and significant as well as facilitate creativity, innovation and collective solidarity, while for the purpose of retaining human resources in a long-term and decreasing their turnover, the second scenario ‘competitive remuneration and the differentiation by position category’ aims to gradually raise the remuneration and differentiate it for all categories of personnel.