« 2 Sept 04. Birthday presents | Main | 12 Sept 04. Falmouth »

8 September

7pm update: the number of US troops killed in Iraq has now officially topped 1000. Will this make any difference to Bush's apparently resurgent re-election prospects? Will America's corporate media even report it? Watch this space...

Here's an example of everything that's wrong with the current state of public 'art' in Britain. The East of England Development Agency (whatever that is) recently ran a competition to find the best potential work of public art which could potentially 'put the east of England on the map' (whose map, exactly?) The winner was a plan by a couple of German architects to build sculptures in the sea near Dunwich, recreating the spires of lost medieval churches which sunk beneath the waves due to coastal erosion centuries ago.

In many ways this is a nice idea. It's certainly an evocative one, and pretty ambitious too. The snag, however, is that the local people hate it. They weren't consulted by the Big Nobs at the Development Agency who were, after all, paying someone to stick bloody great sculptures in the sea off their coast. Neither were they consulted by the two German artists who designed the project, both of whom have admitted that they've never even been to Dunwich. It was more important, it seems, for the bureaucrats to be able to make a big macho 'statement' about the importance of their region than for anyone living there to actually be notified about it.

This is the sort of top-down, arty-farty arrogance that gives public art a bad name. I wonder what a public art project designed in consultation with the local people, and designed to fit in with and be inspired by the landscape and history of the area would have looked like? Probably a lot more interesting, I'd imagine. Certainly a lot more rooted - and undoubtedly great deal more popular.

Posted by paul at September 8, 2004 04:40 PM

Comments

Post a comment