Morning:
8°c
The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square has never been satisfactorily topped since it was built in 1841 for an equestrian statue of William IV, never installed. So much the better. Instead of bearing a dull monarch, the plinth serves altogether more usefully as a Speaker's Corner for sculpture.
Back in 1999, the Royal Society of Arts grabbed it to exhibit the work of contemporary artists - Mark Wallinger, Bill Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread - and, after a period, the Mayor took up the scheme, with works by Marc Quinn and Thomas Schutte.
At the same time, pressure groups have been trying to use the plinth not for art but for official commemoration, one lot wanting to see a statue of Nelson Mandela, another hoping to honour Battle of Britain hero Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Rodney Park.
But public sculpture of that kind only works in societies with consistent shared values, whether national or imperial or religious. When there's no such deep agreement or strong authority, there's nothing to monumentalise. What's good for society spells doom for giant sculptures. Stalin and Saddam confidently erected imperial images of themselves, now toppled. All we have to endure are such ugly but harmless fatuities as the giant "lovers" defacing the beautiful shed of St Pancras.
So should we just give up on commissioning new public sculpture? Maybe, in a way, that's actually what Antony Gormley is suggesting with his smart idea for crowning the Fourth Plinth with living, ordinary people. From 6 July, for 100 days, 24 hours a day, 2,400 randomly chosen applicants will spend an hour each on the plinth, doing whatever takes their fancy, within the limits of the law, prevented from falling or jumping off by a big safety net.
Gormley has written an unfortunately grandiose text explaining this "One & Other" project, in which he says the individuals on the plinth will enjoy "the opportunity to reconsider their own lives from this elevated and particular vantage point" and that "we will witness the mettle of the people of these varied isles".
The Mayor, Boris Johnson, has hailed the project as "a very public demonstration of democracy in action" too. But what we will see, of course, is not a representative sample of the merry folk of these varied isles but a bunch of people who have volunteered themselves in the hope of getting up there, quite a different subset.
It will be a dreamy opportunity for exhibitionists of all kinds, if not actual flashers and mooners. Gormley has covered himself by saying "I have no expectations about how people will react and it is important that an element of surprise and a sense of touching the unknown is built into the project."
There could well be some touching the unknown, I bet. But that's fine too. That's the way we are and it may just be worth seeing.
What's surprising is that, after so many years of reality TV, it took so long for reality sculpture to get here.
Peaches, bag lady for our times
When future generations look back on the consumer boom that drove us crazy from the Eighties to 2008, this picture will remind us what it was all about. Bags. Bags galore. A big bag for every purchase, so you could proclaim you had shopped. You had participated in the consumer economy and thus had the validity of your existence confirmed, at least as society understood it then. Now it looks like a ghost from another era, as out of time as a suit of armour or a toga. The bags make Peaches look strangely forlorn — in fact, almost like another kind of bag lady...
Sir Fred's question of honour
SO Alistair Darling's invitation to former RBS chief Sir Fred Goodwin to give back the huge pension he is taking from the bank he destroyed has been rebuffed. The banker is adamant that he deserves his loot.
But surely the matter cannot rest there. Obviously it is not just inappropriate but, in the face of mounting fury, untenable that Goodwin should keep his £693,000-a-year pension or his knighthood.
But how are they to be surrendered? In Japan, any man of honour seen to be so shamed would feel under a strong compulsion to make amends — traditionally by committing seppuku, ritual self-disembowelment, plunging a short sword into the abdomen and cutting left to right. Of course that wouldn't be the right thing to do here, even for those who have done so much harm to so many as Fred the Shred. Still, it's a thought, isn't it?
