It's a great week for Mark Wallinger. Not only does his fascinating and clever-sounding exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London open next week (it's called the Russian Linesman, it features a magnificent disappearing Tardis, and I wrote about it here), but this morning it was announced that his proposal for the Ebbsfleet Landmark, a major public sculpture for Kent overlooking the A2 and Ebbsfleet International train station, has been selected as the winning design from a final shortlist of submissions.
His proposal is that a giant, lifelike white horse – 50 metres high, twice as tall as the Angel of the North – should bestride Ebbsfleet valley, at a cost of £2m. I rather like the idea for its sheer brilliant effrontery, but it does faintly run the risk of simply looking rather naff (one critic of the proposal is Adrian Searle, an admirer of Wallinger's work in the main, who has called it "silly".)
I also worry about the rash of public sculpture: everyone wants an Angel of the North (qv Anish Kapoor's Tees Valley Giants). In these straitened times, is it quite right to be building this rather bombastic objects? It may be possible to file them under the heading of "cultural regeneration" in a vague way, but beyond their building, do they create a sustainable model of regeneration, of employment? Do these grand and expensive creatures not carry with them an outmoded odour of boom? In short, is it all looking a bit 2006?
