Stephen Bayley

Public offence

Dashi Namdakov’s 'grotesque' She Guardian is a worthy first winner of our new annual award

issue 06 February 2016

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[/audioplayer]There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ — you can find a version in Victoria Tower Gardens — is somewhat collectivist in subject matter.) But there are certainly abundant monuments to the committee mentality, the bureaucratic spirit and art-world groupthink. That is what most contemporary ‘public art’ amounts to.

You will have seen ‘public art’ if you wander through developments of luxury apartments on, say, the southbank Thames littoral between Lambeth and Battersea. Or on a progressive university campus anywhere. Sometimes public art is plonked on ring-road roundabouts in bleak development areas whence true inspiration and authentic industry have long since fled. Public art may be hard to define, but it is always easy to detect: shrieking for attention, but pitiably inarticulate. Brash rather than brave.

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