PLEASE, please, please: no more statues. No more sculptures or public art. No more giant women, or men, or horses, or giant anything else. No more abstract shapes in iron, or bronze, or steel, or cement. Nothing on plinths. Ever again. We have suffered enough.

The reason I say this – the final straw – is the statute that was unveiled in London the other day to the memory of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. We were also told this week that plans to erect a sculpture on the M74 near Gretna Green have been revived. It would be twice the size of the Angel of the North.

Both projects – Wollstonecraft and Gretna – are well intentioned, particularly the Wollstonecraft one. Statues have generally always been of men and often men who were colonialists, or rich, or not very nice, or all of those things, and, even though they were not very nice a long time ago, there’s a feeling we should try to redress the balance by putting up more statues of women. Fair enough. Hence the Wollstonecraft idea.

But the resulting statue highlights the problems inherent in public art and the first is that we can’t agree what statues should be. The ones that are there already have been the target of protest and it’s hard to think of a memorial that wouldn’t be controversial with someone. I’d love to see a Glasgow statue of one of the pilots of 602 Squadron, for example. I’m also amazed there still isn’t a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Grantham. But statues of war heroes do not attract the approval they once did. And statues of women are apparently only acceptable if the women are left-wing.

The Wollstonecraft memorial is obviously part of an attempt to address the problem, but the people behind the project are learning that putting up more statues does not necessarily fix things. In fact, as soon as you make something out of stone or steel, someone is going to say “that doesn’t represent me”, which is exactly what’s happened with Wollstonecraft.

The issue, according to the critics, is that the woman on the Wollstonecraft statue has got bare breasts. I mean it: the statue erected to a pioneering feminist is of a thin, attractive woman with no clothes on. Maggi Hambling, the artist responsible, says the woman is naked because “clothes define people”, but would she have done the same with a man? Perhaps the idea was thought to be acceptable because female nudity is ubiquitous in art and we’ve come to expect it. But the result, sadly, is a very conventional tribute to an unconventional person.

Hambling’s defence also highlights another of the problems with public art: the crap people speak about it. Hambling says, “we all know clothes are limiting” and the same kind of guff has been spouted about the Gretna sculpture which captures, we are told, “the magnetic pull of Scotland”. People think: what does that mean? Does it mean anything to me? And the answer is no.

Perhaps the solution is to stick to something more conventional: the realistic representation of a figure on a plinth, but there are problems here too. First off, why bother? One of the apparent motivations of the Gretna sculpture is to pay tribute to the scientist James Clerk Maxwell but we already have a statue of him, in Edinburgh. I spoke to the man who raised the cash for it, Michael Atiyah, and I understood his motivation in a way: scientists don't get the same sort of recognition as politicians or kings. But a big bronze man on a plinth struck me as a very unoriginal way to pay tribute to him.

The other problem is that even conventional statues aren’t a safe bet because as soon as you erect one, it stays the same while attitudes change. It’s why there’s controversy about statutes of Earl Haig for example: hero when the statue went up, villain now. And the BLM protestors also have their eyes peeled for the smallest transgression. There’s a statue of Victoria Wood in Bury for example, but has BLM seen the lyrics to her song Alternative Tango? Perhaps, one day, it will be a justification for pulling her statue down too.

There are other reasons to hate most public art. Why is so much of it rubbish? Why is it so expensive? But perhaps the question we should really be asking is: why have public art at all? As soon as you put it up, someone will hate it, or find it offensive, or spray graffiti on it. Spend the money elsewhere. Use the steel and stone to build something else. And stop putting people on plinths anyway because none of us really deserve it.

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