Recently there were two very different stories about public art in the Liverpool Daily Post and the Manchester Evening News respectively. The Post led with how it helped save the apparently much loved and iconic SuperLamBanana from being sold to someone or somewhere else (possibly Manchester) after it was revealed that the city did not actually own the rights to the artwork. Reading between the lines however it emerges that it is not the actual yellow sculpture itself that has been saved (‘saved’ by the way in this case means ‘bought’ by the council for around £120,000) but that SLB’s designer has agreed a second version can be made and kept by Liverpool, leaving him free to flog the original.
However even this deal has a bizarre caveat – Liverpool’s imitation SLB will be able to stay in the city for ‘at least 80 years’. This would suggest that despite the deal struck between the artist and council, the ‘ownership’ of SLB Mark II will revert to the artist’s estate come 2089.
Meanwhile at the other end of the M62 the MEN reported another controversial piece of public art, Thomas Heatherwick’s B of the Bang at Eastlands, will be pulled down as planned due to structural issues but then re-built, possibly at a different location. Authorities have reportedly said that the tax-payer will not foot the bill for the reassembled BotB - but the issue has reawakened all the old arguments and debate about the cost and value of public art to society.
Professionally I have had to wrestle with such arguments when tasked with launching Bolton MBC’s Spirit of Sport tower outside of the Reebok Stadium. The council and other partners were (quite rightly) concerned that even though there had been a cap put on the amount of public money put into the project, any tax-payers cash going towards a public artwork could provoke a backlash.
Well, I won’t bore you with all the details but in a nutshell most people (helped by positive reporting in both local and national media) bought into the Spirit of Sport and the principles behind it.
What really helped achieve this (beyond an award winning PR campaign) was that the work made images of people from the local community intergal to the entire concept. This automatically elevated it above the usual mud-slinging, sniping and finger-pointing that often dog public art projects, and it certainly got a much softer ride in the media than SLB or the spiky explosion of steel sat in East Manchester.
Of course you could say that what the Spirit of Sport gained in striving for mainstream acceptance it lost in terms of creative edginess or ‘daring vision’, but the fact remains when launched the message was ‘it’s art about the people, for the people’ – and on that front it still delivers 100%.
Tags: Awards, Culture, PR, Public Sector
