When Public Art Goes Bad

There's art everywhere you look today, from the humble bench to the beach front.

It's become a received wisdom that public art is a Good Thing. But - on the day that Thomas Heatherwick Studios have reached a £1.7 million out-of court settlement after the biggest sculpture in the UK started dropping spikes - it's worth noting that things all too often go wrong, even when they didn't have to.

Heatherwick's 'B Of The Bang' is – at 56 metres – more than twice the height of the Angel of the North. The sculpture was erected in 2004, to mark the Manchester Commonwealth games two years earlier. By early 2006, a week before the sculpture's official opening, the first spike had fallen and the sculpture was cordoned off.

A badly made sculpture is the worst outcome at the end of the long process. But things can start going bad much earlier than that.

The first place to go wrong is by making alienating the local community, who rarely see the benefits of art when schools, hospitals and community centres are underfunded anyway. It's vital to take the public with you, nurturing local art champions to bring the wider public with them.

I recently attended a public consultation for a new public art strategy in Worthing, where there were just six people who didn't work for the council. And even though three of us left before the 'break out groups' the council officer in charge has described it as a 'very useful' session with a 'successful outcome'. Instead of nurturing six people who clearly want public art in the town, the council's officers are going to press ahead without support, and you can see the car crash coming, can't you?

Of course, you can make the problem even bigger once you get the engine started. A poor artist's impression and a lazy press release will help. In Littlehampton, plans for 400 metres of seafront regeneration have as a centrepiece 'the longest bench in the world'. And the council have reduced all the improvements to one word – so a 'bench' is costing a cool million. With such bad spin, of course local residents are 'up in arms'; well, in a run-down seaside town, wouldn't you be? Now, can you see the car, picking up speed?

After you've started to lose control, you may as well put your foot to the floor and commit money to buying something unpopular. The quickest way to do this is to throw as much of the budget as possible at something very modern, technically difficult, completely untried and by a largely unknown artist.

Back in Worthing, the whole budget for seafront art has been given to a forest of forty solar-powered lamposts at local beauty spot Splash Point. Already Walter Jack, the artist behind the scheme, has added so much to the initial £70,000 bill that the local council have decided to build the project in-house instead. Imagine Michaelangelo's David built by the local Corporation. Go on. Or the Mona Lisa, painted by the Municipal Works. The Parks & Gardens Department and their Hanging Baskets of Babylon.

As if taking the artist out of the art wasn't enough, the council's legal team are getting involved too. With the project already eight months behind schedule, the council will erect a single steel pole over winter, to see if the sculpture is safe and suitable for the location. Which you'd have hoped would have been considered before the commission was chosen, wouldn't you? Especially with experienced 'lead artist' Steve Geliot taking a hefty wage to advise the council.

But don't worry, we all like to watch a high-speed car crash (the evidence – Top Gear and Formula One). And even better -  Jeremy Deller's smashed-up car was on the shortlist for Trafalgar Square's empty plinth.

So crashed cars are public art. And maybe, just maybe, that's been Worthing Borough Council's plan all long. Better than an original Walter Jack, a Jeremy Deller, but on the cheap.