…on the quietest media night of the year. So whispers a politician when he uses a potentially unpopular policy on public art  to scrap both the $1m centenary monument plus the commitment to the 1% for public art policy. It’s the wrong time to be spending $1m on a single work of art, says Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, invoking the global financial meltdown. How different was the story announced on February 3, 2008, when the shortlisting process was in full swing. Since then, the philistines have had him by the ear, and the combination of the backlash against public art in general, plus the underwhelming quality of the contenders for the monument has buried the idea of a arts splurge. How much this will effect ongoing spending (have two policies been killed in the same announcement?) remains to be seen.

Reported tonight on the ABC, the overall budget for public art will also be capped at $1.2m, but you’ll have to wait until someone’s back at work on Tuesday to read the details in a press release. Or rather, that’s where it should be: this is the original release I found when I resorted to Google…

ArtWranglers has long assumed the monument was a dead duck, in a city full of the little blighters. And so we can confirm – ArtWranglers’ nomination in August 2008 for a Readymade Monument (above) which has already been in place for 20 months – is hereby the frontrunner for Heritage Listing. Meanwhile, what opportunities are being lost? Surely all it needs is confidence, good advice, and some good stories to go with it to achieve some really Inspirational Objects.