Lifting the looks of Canberra's nooks

Today this crusading, imaginative column continues its critically acclaimed occasional series of good ideas for ways suburbs might spend this money, ways that will impart some uniqueness to hitherto nondescript neighbourhoods (of which this city has a superabundance).

On Monday of this week my daily feed from Colossal, the art and visual culture blog, featured a pictorial story about Amsterdam-based artist Frank "Frankey" de Ruwe, who every week finds new spots in the city to make playful, often ironic installations.

You need to see what he does to properly appreciate it. So Google him and/or read the Colossal piece The Nooks And Crannies of Amsterdam Are a Canvas for Frankey's Playful Installations (thisiscolossal.com).

You will find that for example he has just transformed a bridge pylon into a rhinoceros. Genius! Elsewhere, an awning suggesting to him the shape of a wave, he has, wittily, added a miniature surfer (I think it is Barbie's companion Surfing Ken) to the awning. More genius!

What if a suburb spent some of its Canberra Liberals' loot on commissioning Frankey or any one of the many accomplished suburban artists like him (their essential species is much celebrated and reported on by Colossal) to come and spend a year artistically at large working his or her magic?

They are usually as poor as church mice, these sorts of artists, and would leap at the prospect of all-expenses-paid well-paid employment in Canberra. For $500,000 a suburb would get great value out of a Frankey.

Of course dull, plodding, oldies-infested suburbs will want to spend their Liberals' windfall on dull things like the upgrading of already perfectly adequate kerbs and gutters and pavements. But suburbs of potential character and sparkle will want to spend the money on enabling the arts to impart joy and flair and glamour to people's lives.

And to assist that suburban sparkle to happen I urge Ms Lee, when she becomes chief minister, to insist that no one over 30 be allowed to have any say in how their suburb spends the Liberals' largesse. Boring old farts will want the money spent on boring things.

Meanwhile my oldies-infested inner-South suburb, all of its infrastructure First Worldly and adequate and not needing a Liberals' cent spent on it, is typical of Canberra suburbia in that it is utterly public art bereft. For shame.

Frankey and his ilk! Bring them on, suburban Canberra!

An unforeseen blessing of the federal capital city being an inland metropolis apologetically crouched around a fake lake is that the inner city is not blighted by the spectre-spectacle of hulking cruise liners.

Surely they are ugliest man-made objects ever made.

On a recent weekend in Sydney I found, again, a swaggering ocean liner (in this instance the Ovation Of The Seas - what does that name even mean?) often completely blocking out one's views of those twin magnificences the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House.

Anything that ever blocks one's view of anything magnificent is to be deplored but when hulking cruise ships do it the atrocity is compounded by the ugliness of the beast doing the blocking.

One of my several reasons for never going on a cruise is that as an aesthete I cannot in principle set foot on something so brutalistically ugly as the big cruise ships. To be a patron of ugliness is to endorse it. Oscar Wilde, my hero in these things (a new essay about him recalls he was called the "Apostle of Aestheticism") would not have gone aboard the Ovation Of The Seas and so neither will I.

Oscar and I shudder at the behemoth's obscene stacking of deck upon deck upon deck of passenger boxes, capitalism's echo of the way in which live-export vessels cram as many sheep and cattle aboard as the callous regulations will allow.

To capitalism and its arch-capitalists we are all always just sheep and cattle (Marx and Engels too would have condemned the modern cruise ship). But the nakedness of what capitalism really thinks of us, the consumers, is at its most naked in the shape and form of the modern cruise ship. That shape and form says to us (at least to sensitive men like Oscar and this columnist) "Once aboard you are nothing but cargo, and paying cargo at that, ye suckers."

MORE WARDEN:

Home from Sydney and falling into a snooze on a park bench beside Lake Burley Griffin I had a bad dream in which our city's lake was bullied and dominated by a gigantic cruise liner, this time called (in the way dreams have of making distorted references to our waking experiences) the Ovulation Of The Seas.

Ovulation blotted out every view of all of the parliamentary triangle's exquisite buildings of importance and blocked out all the usual sweeping views across to the mystic mountains.

But then I awoke from this nightmare to find the actual Lake Burley Griffin still unchanged and so of course (artificial, characterless, sterile, algal, people-repelling, sullenly ornamental, useless and an enormous watery waste of an enormous space) a living nightmare in its own right.