Aurora Furore

Ever since it appeared outside Sheffield's Millennium Galleries on 1st March, this object has been causing a lot of controversy. It's a sculpture called Aurora by Anthony Caro.

Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust is cock-a-hoop about the piece. According to the Trust's website:

”It is extremely significant that one of the world’s finest sculptors chose Sheffield, of all the cities in the UK, to site his work. It is a wonderful statement of the progress that the city has made in its reputation for the arts, and we are absolutely delighted that the people of Sheffield will be able to enjoy this stunning sculpture for the next 2 years.”

Some of the people of Sheffield are less convinced about the sculpture's merits. Here are a few of the comments that have been posted the Sheffield Forum website:

"It looks like a piece of cast iron junk, tarted up with cheap paint."

"I walked past it today and thought someone had left a boiler in the middle of the street."

"It's dull."

"If somebody went and painted Aurora blue, could we pass it off as Thomas the Tank Engine?"

"It's a boiler. Painted red. How inspiring."

Speaking personally, I'm not quite sure what to make of Aurora. On the face of it, I find it pretty uninspiring. So far it has not intrigued, provoked, aroused or engaged me... but I'm willing to give it a second chance!

Part of the problem is that Aurora has been sited in a position where people hurry past, when it ought to be located where people are encouraged to linger and look at it more closely. The subtleties of this type of sculpture cannot really be appreciated from a passing glance.

Flickr regular Sam Judson has taken a lot of photos of sculptures in Newcastle. I have to say that I find many of them much more interesting than Aurora.

What do you think?

Comments

[Da Goldfish]

I think it's a great big piece of shit. Conceptual artists are talentless fools.