Running the City by Felicity Fenner

Author:Felicity Fenner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth

CHAPTER 3

ON HOME GROUND

When the Eiffel Tower was built in the late 19th century, it attracted wide and vocal opposition from the intellectual elite of Paris. Artists, sculptors, writers and architects wrote a letter to the Minister of Works protesting against construction of the ‘ridiculous tower’ that they complained would dominate Paris like a ‘gigantic black smokestack’.1 Signatories to the petition included author Guy de Maupassant and his circle of cultural connoisseurs. Roland Barthes tells the story of de Maupassant hating the Eiffel Tower so intensely that he often took lunch in the restaurant at its base, not because of the offerings on the menu, but because it was the only place in Paris where the author could avoid seeing the offending edifice.2 The tower was intended as a temporary structure to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution at the 1889 World’s Fair, with an expectation that it would be removed, like much public art today, after twenty years. The giant wrought iron monument, however, soon proved useful as a wireless telegraph transmitter, and, as the highest tower ever built up to that point, people came to love it and plans to remove it were eventually abandoned.

A modern equivalent to the Eiffel Tower is Anish Kapoor’s Orbit, dubbed by some as the ‘Eyeful tower’.3 Cre-ated in 2012 for London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, it was also referred to as ‘Boris’s Folly’, a reference to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London at the time, who oversaw the commission.4 Orbit is a 115-metre-high spiral made from red tubular steel, topped with viewing platforms that provide vistas across Olympic Park in the city’s east and beyond towards central London.5 Like the Eiffel Tower, it serves a place-making role while also making the kind of bold artistic statement that is always bound to divide opinion. An online poll published by the Guardian, which given its left-leaning and cultured readership would presumably be more supportive of public art than the tabloid newspapers, revealed that only thirty-nine per cent of its readers considered Orbit a ‘grand design’, while sixty-one per cent considered it ‘garbage’.6

Artworks in the public domain that provide an opportunity for first-hand interaction and participation are viewed more generously by the public. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2006) in Chicago, for example, is one of the world’s most photographed public artworks, appearing in all the tourist guidebooks and in millions of selfies across social media. Enthusiastically embraced by Chicago and the world, ‘The Bean’, as it is colloquially known, was built as a bulbous silver form standing over ten metres high and twenty metres wide. The shape of the work was inspired by that of a mercury drop, and the curved reflective surface captures the city’s famous skyline and clouds above. So popular was the work that in 2015 it was copied by Karamay, a remote, oil-rich city in the north-west of China, prompting the threat of legal action over copyright infringement from the artist.

Unlike most public artworks that are fixed and finite in

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