Public art disease found in Coatbridge

You know, an admirer of mine sent me this nice wee photie of something terrible that has happened at Blair Bridge in Coatbridge next to the Monkland Canal. It's another piece of work by cliché artist Andy Scott, this time commemorating the work of renowned comic book writer Mark Millar, who grew up in the town. The six-metre high steel archway shows a character called Captain Coatbridge and two female superheroes - it was commissioned as part of on-going efforts to regenerate the canal but it looks really out of place to me against the old stonework of the canalside. I hope a lot of you are saying, "Oh no! Not another metal thing-me - please make it go away!"

Andy is probably making a good living producing all these bits of welded up steel - and goodness knows we all have to make a living somehow. I wrote earlier this year that one of his works, positioned on a roundabout, had been successfully destroyed by a drunk driver (fantastic wasn't it?) but unfortunately there is no word of others biting the dust. It's very sad for our nice wee country that we only seem to have one artist - he crops up in Cumbernauld, on the M8 at Baillieston, at Port Glasgow, almost everywhere, including Lomondgate! And because they are all done in the same galvanised finish, they look like bits of motorway signs that have been misplaced. Soon people will be saying that their towns are quite distinctive because they don't have a bit of scrap metal stuck in the middle of a roundabout.

Spare a thought though for poor Andy. I'm sure he is a creative sort of person so it must be really boring for him to be churning the same old stuff out all day long for every commission. So if I can give him a wee bit of advice it would be to stop doing these metal motorway signs and bits of horses and find another look for his stuff.

But in fact you will usually find that town planners are involved in commissioning public art so the blame can be laid at their door. I think this is a disgrace for a profession already on its knees as a result of incompetence by the goons in London and their inability to adopt the wisdom of the market economy in dealing with regeneration. All this public art stuff is a sideshow that the real movers and shakers in this country will avoid at all costs. So my advice to the RTPI Borg is to stop commissioning public art and get on with some real work.