Supersize me ... The twin cooling towers of a Sheffield power station are up for redevelopment as part of Channel 4's Big Art project
What do you think of when you think of public art? Lumpen statues of municipal worthies? Battered war memorials? Or maybe your sights are set a little higher - towards the looming steel exoskeleton of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, perhaps, or the cascading funnel of balloons that made up Luke Jerram's Sky Orchestra.
Channel 4, whose rinky-dink Big Art project has just entered its final phase, wants you to holler noisily for the latter. Following an enormous competition in which more than 1,400 spots across the UK took part in a bid to host a piece of public art, the shortlist has been whittled down to just six places across the UK.
Each will now get into a process of commissioning artists, raising funds and what the project's website rather alarmingly calls "persuading their extended community" (hot irons and pincers at the ready). The idea is to have six shiny new pieces of art ready to go by the time we get to next autumn.
Not just yer lumpen statues, neither: as the website goes on to explain in admirably pluralistic detail, the organisers are in the market for fleeting events and playful interventions as well as permanent works of art.
Difficult to grumble at a project which has such bold vision, which slices through the ribbons of red tape that often smother similar plans, and indeed which has given the often-unloved and invariably underrated arena of public art a spell in the limelight. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - the chance to get involved in the commissioning of a work of art," we're told. "But not just any work of art. A big work of art."
But why on earth this obsession with size?
The project seems to take it as read that the only public art projects that count come in XXXL. Looming large are the gigantic silhouettes of a pair of power station cooling towers opposite Sheffield's Meadowhall (unmistakeable to anyone who's crawled past them on the M1), up for transformation into some form of cultural venue, but also on the Big Art's shortlist are plans to regenerate a swath of Burnley; a project based on an enormous slag heap in east London; and nothing less than an entire Scottish island (specifically the Isle of Mull, which is operating as a free-floating canvas while discussions about where the work could actually be sited are ongoing).
It's easy to see why this is so, given that the discourse about contemporary art - or at least the kind of contemporary art that gets noticed by the media - so often seems to operate as if supersize came as standard, whether it's via the cavernous spaces of Tate Modern, that overbearing, dictatorial Angel of the North or the barn-like spectacle of Gateshead's Baltic (the size of the last being in inverse proportion to the interest of its contents).
Though the details are still being discussed, I can't help worrying that the works that end up being created under the aegis of Big Art will be just that - big and not much else, plenty of brawn and precious little brain.
And, though I hope I'm wrong, today's Telegraph offers a cautionary tale, one that should be pinned to the noticeboards of any communities yet to be "persuaded" by the redevelopments being hatched in their midst and ostensibly in their name. Three years after a set of beautiful Victorian Turkish Baths won the BBC's first Restoration project - a highly coloured flurry of computer-generated optimism - the site is still, well, a building site, with the redevelopment project stalled and going nowhere fast. Big ambitions, big ideals. Big deal.
