Mark Wallinger

Public art & the horse’s arse


If art is dependent on context, what kind of context does the new industrial landscape of Ebbsfleet make? In the art world, the thumbs nay be up for Mark Wallinger’s Ebbsfleet horse. Ian Jack has a column in Saturday’s Guardian which looks at this from a different persective; what the people who live in the economically uncertain landscape of Ebbsfleet think of Wallinger’s horse:

According to Sandra Soder, the secretary of the Gravesend Historical Society, Wallinger’s horse has aroused diverse local opinion, with the loudest voice coming from those most opposed, but the general feeling is that the promoters had deemed the people of north Kent “too culturally inept” to have a deciding view on the form Britain’s biggest work of art should take. In the words of one Northfleet man, nobody had asked whether or not “they wanted to wake up every morning looking into a giant horse’s arse”.

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