What makes art democratic is its capacity to allow someone to remake it as their own art work. Take this bench for example, part of the Liverpool Biennial 2012.
Photo by Andy Miah on Flickr
Photo by MobileVirgin on Flickr
Photo by Neil Shenton on flickr
It is beautifully presented with awesome lighting. If you take a good photograph of it, you can come away with something that you feel pride in having experienced and captured.
The art of this artist becomes your art, the moment you line up the camera, choose your angle, perhaps even your settings, and ‘click’. It may even become more artful, if you use some creative software to edit the image, or some unique processing technique.
Art that allows people to recreate the work is the most compelling example of democratic art. Galleries that restrict photograph or other kinds of remaking limit their ability to democratize art. There may even be an important political reason for why all art should be democratic, but we will have to think carefully about how to support the artist in this system