Attack of the Public Art 'Monsters'

"The 'free-for-all' in tasteless, poorly executed public artworks must be halted, museum and gallery chiefs say."

"Marjorie Trusted, senior curator of sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, said that many commissions were 'disappointing, old-fashioned and awkward' and Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, dismissed them as 'horrors' – 'Frankenstein monster memorials'."

"'This free-for-all needs to be regulated and I'm worried about the sheer proliferation of these Frankenstein monsters.' Lobby groups, he said, were deciding that they needed a statue to commemorate someone and pressurising the authorities into erecting a memorial. 'Over the last few years we've seen tens of new sculptures erected in the centre of the city. It's almost reached epidemic proportions. These are not sculptures by well-known blue-chip artists because there don't seem to be many of those.'"