It was the goofy thing we didn’t know we needed to bring a touch of magical life to Nathan Phillips Square. And yet I was surprised to read this week that the designers of the long-unfolding revamp of Nathan Phillips Square don’t like it. They love it!” And I think when people love something, you don’t take it away from them — especially when it comes to public art. There are giant indistinct hunks of brown metal all over the city attesting to the difficulty of creating public art people will notice and enjoy and interact with. My own sense is that successful public art is as much accident as artistry: take the haunting portraits of commuters in the new-ish murals at Union Station, successful art, I think, in depicting existential loneliness and misery and movement.

Source: thestar October 03, 2016 09:56 UTC