Some of the most significant in the CBD are Forme Del Mito, a set of four bronze sculptures installed at the foot of Jacob’s Ladder on Upper Edward Street; The Guardian, a mythical dog/human carrying a bag with a tree growing out of it on Wharf Street; and Rapture, two vertical human bodies on Market Street.
There’s more, seemingly everywhere you look in the city when you stop to notice it.
Emblem is a giant stainless-steel kangaroo at George and Roma streets by Geoffrey Ricardo, a playful recreation of the kangaroo from the Australian coat of arms.
Amid the current industrial dispute at Cross River Rail, it’s surrounded by CFMEU flags in a makeshift “Solidarity Island” created by union members.
Close by, Freshwater Lens by Judy Watson is a brass sculpture suspended underneath the Turbot Street overpass.
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We’ve seen outrage about public art before.
Remember when the $1 million sideways elephant sculpture, The World Turns, was installed outside GOMA in 2012?
Then-arts minister Ros Bates derided it as a “shocking misuse of taxpayer dollars”.
When the Whitlam government bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for the National Gallery for $1.3 million in 1973, it was the most paid for an American painting in the world at the time, and ridiculed in a Daily Mirror front page: “$1mill. Aust. Masterpiece. Drunks did it.”
Last year it was valued at $500 million.
Asking questions is valid – I’ll no doubt get mixed comments below, and I welcome the debate – but paying for art and supporting artists to do their work (and pay rent and feed their families) builds a more vibrant culture.
Art is evocative, provocative, makes you think, brings beauty to your everyday, and just generally makes life more fun.
I don’t pretend to be an art critic, and I’m not saying you must love all art.
But there’s something about art criticism, especially of the weird, modern and abstract varieties, that makes me love it even more fiercely.
