Have you ever walked or driven past a piece of ‘public art’ and wondered how on earth it got commissioned, or whether it is just a bit of leftover junk from a building site? In this week’s Spectator, Stephen Bayley awards the inaugural ‘What’s That Thing?’ prize to the very worst specimen he can find: Dashi Namdakov’s ‘She Guardian’ on Park Lane, pictured above. And it really is awful.
You can listen to Stephen discussing the problem with public art on our podcast with Posy Metz from Historic England here.
My own personal favourites when it comes to utterly inexplicable ‘sculptures’ in public places are the Dorking Cock, plonked on a boring roundabout outside the town as a tribute to the rather fabulous-looking hen that was bred there:
And then the ‘skittles’ in Warrington, which were supposed to be a way of rejuvenating it after the IRA bombed the town centre in 1993. They’re properly known as ‘the guardians’, but this doesn’t make them look any less like something from a Barbie house:
But these are rather tame compared to the truly amazing pieces of ‘art’ from around the world that people have been sharing on Twitter in the past few days:
The facade of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is reassuringly traditional. The barristers who work there occupy buildings which were once home to the Earl of Sandwich and the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval. If there were any building in London in which wigs and gowns would seem a natural form of dress,
Isabel Hardman
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