Friendship Circle

The Western section of Cheltenham's Sandford Park used to have a clump of mature trees as one of its loveliest features. They were felled two decades or more ago, replaced by an inanimate "Friendship Circle". This consists of three blobs in cast iron by the South African artist Neville Gabie, intended to commemorate Cheltenham's various twinning links.

Like the Sophie Ryder I posted about last week, this piece of public art came in for a barrage of criticism at first: I joined the chorus of disapproval. But seeing it today I realised it had come to earn its keep - certainly more so than the sculpture in the Eastern section of the park, The Weathered Man, about which I wrote last December.

Maybe my change of mind was influenced by the grandsons discovering that one of the trio was hollow. "We are baby crabs in our mother's shell," said Laurie.

Lapping it up

As Ogden Nash wrote, "The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild. You only have to live until your child has a child." Well worth the wait, I say!

It was 16 years ago that Sophie Ryder's Minotaur and the Hare was purchased for permanent display in a prominent position in Cheltenham's Promenade. There were the predictable howls of protest, but now I guess they would be easily drowned out by a chorus of approval - if it was to be mooted that the sculpture be removed. The chorus would be led by grandparents deprived of a most beautiful climbing frame.

Art, public and commercial

In today's Guardian, Simon Hoggart tells us all about his Baltic cruise, and seeing Copenhagen's famous harbour statue: "This was paid for," he writes, "by Denmark's best-known brewer, and if it were in Britain it would be known as the Carlsberg Little Mermaid." Indeed. The evidence is there for all to witness in Cheltenham, with the placement this week of ten fibreglass horses in public places throughout the town centre. The one in my photograph, decorated by local equestrian artist Sally Lancaster, is less commercially-adorned than some. The sponsor's name is nevertheless prominent on the plinth, only hidden by the lady pushing her shopping along.

Why does promotion of art have to go so inexorably hand in hand with promotion of its patrons? It's the same story with our recent Holst statue. But not in the past. Even as recently as 1997, when Sophie Ryder's Minotaur and the Hare was purchased for its Promenade site, the donors' contributions were only quite unostentatiously acknowledged.