My hometown's public art

Dubliners have a lovely irreverent attitude to the public works of art dotted around their city: they come up with some great nicknames for them. Lots of the pieces are pretty controversial and each one has a bit of a story behind it. I give you:

The Stiletto in the Ghetto

The real name for this one is the Spire of Dublin. It is probably the most criticised of all the public works. It was a millennium project that ran ages over time and about a gajillion euro over budget. The nickname comes from the fact that it rises out a fairly dangerous area of the city – albeit on the city’s main thoroughfare. It actually doesn’t look that bad in the photo that I’ve taken here: when they sky is blue and the sun is shining (about three days a year) it can be a little bit ‘beam-of-light-ish’. But on a grey, rainy day (the majority of the year), it pretty much resembles a dirty syringe jutting out of the city’s addled arm.

The Hags with the Bags

I think this one is actually fairly well liked. It seems to hark back to a pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland when the people were a bit frumpier and didn’t have expensive cafe terraces to sit at when they wanted to have a chat.

The Tart with the Cart

I think this is the oldest of public artworks. It’s a statue of Molly Malone, she of Dublin’s most famous song. The story goes that she walked the streets of the city selling cockles and mussels. But, as you can imagine from the depiction above, historians tell us that she was probably selling more than just what was on her cart, if you know what I mean.

The Floosie in the Jacuzzi

First, a little FYI: in Dublin slang, floosie refers to a woman of questionable or low moral standards. In fact, the statue is supposed to be of Annalivia, the spirit of the River Liffey that runs through the centre of Dublin. Notice that this is the only picture I wasn’t able to get by myself. This is because it was removed from its location on O’Connell Street (the main street in the centre of the city) a few years ago. Now, some will say this was to make room for the Spire mentioned above; more likely, it was costing too much in maintenance. Honestly, poor Annalivia was the most abused work of art ever to have the misfortune to be displayed in my home town: people peed on her, threw rubbish at her, wrote on her, and regularly filled her little waterfalls with laundry detergent so that she’d drown in an overflowing sea of foam. Only in a city as dangerous as Dublin would inanimate objects have to be put in some sort of art-lovers witness protection program.