While there isn't anything inherently wrong with public art built for pleasure, these recent efforts in England do highlight American sculpture's complacency in the face of pressing issues like the Iraq war, the erosion of our civil liberties, and the threat posed by global warming. More than perhaps any other fine art, public sculpture is equipped to address the kinds of problems we share as a community. No one wants a revival of didactic propaganda, but the current strategy of avoiding difficult subject matter isn't sufficient, either.

I suppose much American public art does avoid difficult subject matter, but since much public art is financed by a “Percent for Art” policy, and since contemporary American society is still beset by divisive “identity politics,” most city councils are reluctant to approve of controversial art of any kind.

But I don’t know why public art built for pleasure isn’t sufficient. Think, for example, of the fine sculptures of Calder, Chagall, DuBuffet, Miro, Oldenburg, and Moore.

Petrovich mentions Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” and New York’s as being merely for pleasure. But in today’s fractured urban communities, I think both installations did (or are doing) a fine job of bringing together the various peoples of a community as well as instilling civic pride.

Finally, sculptures can be expensive. So I think the author does his topic a disservice by limiting himself to sculptures, despite his assertion that sculpture is better equipped than other kinds of art to “address the kinds of problems we share as a community.” For art that performs that function, I think we can look instead to cheaper forms of publicly funded art, like murals and Poetry in Motion (poems in subway cars). And let’s not forget various forms of guerrilla art, like graffiti, street theater, and public poetry readings.

Good post, MaryAnn! Yes, poetry and thearter are public art, as is dance. I think the problem for this forum is, they're ephemeral, and it's hard to generate a public response to them.

The internet is an odd context, in which a nimbus of ephemeral remarks are made about topics that, generally, take some time to establish themselves. If a senator gets caught trying to get lucky in a bathroom the response is pretty much instant, but the positions displayed by the response have been cooking for much, much longer.

For all the complaining about how modern art fails to be eternal, as a target it displays an admirable durability. The haters of our time have a core gallery of Etartende Kunst that includes Serra, Duchamp, Mapplethorpe, LIn, Oldenburg, and on and on and on.

I have no idea why people who fail to complain about war then complain about war memorials. I assume they're like the people who don't really believe in god but whine about the importance of Christian symbols in our public spaces. Oh, America.

The absolutely most awful sculpture in the world is in Waterville, Maine. It looks like Sputnik but cost more. The whole city, accept for a few die hards, hate this God awful thing. Nana