This chapter deals with the question how works of, mainly visual, art in public space can function within the concept of cultural democracy. It explores how the concept and practice of public participation as a precondition for works in public space from the perspective of cultural democracy has shifted over the last 25 years from a focus on public space towards a focus on public domain. I follow Jacques Rancière in what a work of art within the aesthetic regime can do and zoom in on an installation by the artist collective RAAAF. In the conclusion the text returns to the notion of participation as an important aspect of the working of cultural democracy in public space The text is written for this publication that is situated within the field of social studies, but the author is from the discipline of art history and art theory. While social studies on art focus on what people do with works of art, the other approach focuses on what works of art do to people, how they affect them, what their effect is. The implied opposition, however, is less diametrical than it seems. This text operates in this grey zone of suppositions and beliefs on the one hand, and practices on the other ( Claire Bishop takes a more pessimistic view on this: ‘But since participatory art is not only a social activity but also a symbolic one, both embedded in the world and at one remove from it, the positivist social sciences are ultimately less useful in this regard than the abstract reflections of political philosophy’, Bishop (Artificial Hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso, 2012, p. 7)).