Our town has lot of systems that desperately need funding an attention; a stormwater system that is not even close to up to the task of handling local rainfall, a lot of people who are either homeless, hungry or both, regular failures of basic services like rubbish bin collection, a truly pathetic excuse for 'public transport', and most critically of all, a healthcare system collapsing around us because medical professionals can't find homes to live in or support for things like childcare, are each expected to do the work of 3 people, and burn out in less than 5 years and leave forever. Homeowner's rates and soforth keep going up in price to supposedly cover services and the services keep struggling due to lack of funding. Now, this is all very normal and standard Large-ish Rural Town stuff, nothing surprising. But it does mean that every time the council throws thousands to millions of dollars at something like building a massive entertainment centre that nobody will use, or trying to open a third shopping centre (our second shopping centre eviscerated our first shopping centre by splitting the customer base and now we have two barely-holding-on shopping centres instead of one thriving one; the plan for the third one, fortunately, fell through), then the whole local population gets up in arms about the waste of money. Now, I'm not going to get into the weeds of which of the councils various initiatives I do and don't support (I'm a lot more supportive of many of them than the average local in the Facebook chat groups, but others I agree are fucking stupid); the point is that this is the general attitude of the population to buying new shit with no obvious utility.
So the council shells out for some new public art. This isn't unusual; we are, despite the general attitudes of the town, somehow a pretty artsy place. We've got a lot of abstract sculptures in metal and limestone (the town is built on limestone) scattered about, usually with some significance to the area they're in. The old train station (now a playground) has a bunch of abstract train themed art. The theatre has a massive mural of the face of the guy it's named after. The community centre has a lot of protective railing (it's right next to a sinkhole) and it's all wrought iron depictions of historical industries of the town and soforth. Et cetera.
The problem with this thing was threefold:
They announced it super proudly right at the point where everyone was particularly upset about rates hikes.
It cost $136,000 for a town that didn't have $136,000 lying around.
Almost everyone who lives here thinks it looks fucking stupid.
Personally I don't hate the appearance on its own, but even I have to admit that it's very jarring in its location; it doesn't match the other art in the area at all. It's supposed to be an imagined specimen of ancient megafauna, not based on any actual real thing that lived int he area but just like the concept that there was once megafauna here, which I find to be tacky and stupid as an explanation and I think that's the general consensus. At least it's in a better location than the initial proposal pictures showed it, which was right in front of the historic brickwork of the town hall in the middle of the footpath and in everyone's fucking way.
In short, there's nothing massively wrong with Cast In Blue. People just think it looks stupid and pretentious in relation to our other art, and more critically, it's become a lightning rod for the town's resentment of the council's perceived financial mismanagement of the town in a time when we desperately need them to be on the ball.
