Do you love or loathe Britain's public art?

A sudden craving for big, bold works of public art has swept Britain. Will future generations appreciate it?

Jonathan Jones

In the silvery early morning light under the great glass roof, colossal lovers embrace, the man's suit and woman's skirt, long limbs and smooth faces, all cast in bronze on a scale that is - according to your feelings about the sculpture unveiled last year at London's St Pancras station - either moving or grotesque. Welcome to the land that taste forgot. How can a country that vaunts its artistic brilliance greet people off the train from continental Europe with this artless folly? Aesthetically backward, sloppily executed, a work with no merit whatsoever ... but hold on.

Recently I gawped at the St Pancras lovers at the start of a journey around Britain to try to understand public art instead of condemning its more vulgar expressions, such as this hideous mistake. For 10 years now - for this year is the 10th anniversary of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, the original contemporary "landmark" monument - an entire category of art has defied the critics and made a mockery of the snobs. A cascade of commissions since has resulted in similarly huge works like Thomas Heatherwick's B of the Bang.

Public art, by which I mean art that aspires to speak not to a limited gallery-going public but to the entire people, is the defining British art of our time. Week by week spectacular new commissions of "landmark" art are announced. The Angel of the South, the latest, will soar 50 metres into the sky above a new Kent traffic hub, twice as high as the icon it cockily seeks to rival, with a shortlist of respected artists - Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Richard Deacon, Christopher Le Brun and Daniel Buren. Big projects are in the pipeline in Wales, Belfast and Scotland. There are less famous, though not necessarily more modest, new sculptures in places from Erith in Kent to Newbiggin Bay in Northumbria.

And yet just last week one art expert, Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, denounced all these "Frankenstein monster memorials". Anonymous locals express dissent by the ancient means of physical attack; public art has always attracted violence and the mysterious assailants who have repeatedly damaged Maggie Hambling's scallop-shell Britten monument at Aldeburgh can claim the precedent of those who stoned Michelangelo's David 500 years ago. Even those who commission "landmark" art can end up feeling cheated, like Manchester city council which is taking designer Thomas Heatherwick to court over structural flaws in his B of the Bang. What does it all mean? Is enthusiasm outstripping achievement? Is Gormley a one-off whose success cannot be emulated as easily as councils hope? Is Britain redefining its landscape or leaving a load of scrap metal for future generations?

My feature in today's G2 gives my answers. But what do you think of the art that is modern Britain's legacy to the future?

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/02/the_new_embraceable_britain.html