Economist and philanthropist Gareth Morgan offered to pay for a 9.9m high million-dollar sculpture, created by Christchurch artist Phil Price, to be placed on the corner of Marine Parade and Pacific Ave, which also happens to be outside Dr Morgan's house.
The Public Art Advisory Group advised in favour. Council voted against.
Since then there has been much debate among locals.
My view is the council made the right decision.
Not because I don't like the statue. Personally I think it's ugly. Others may find it beautiful. I accept their opinion. Who am I to argue with that? Art is in the eye of the beholder.
"What about Michaelangelo's David," some of my colleagues tuned. "Did I not like that, that was public art?"
Actually I do like Michaelangelo's David.
But Michaelangelo isn't coming to the Mount any time soon to erect a biblical male nude on Marine Parade. That is my issue with public art. I like some public art of old, but modern public art is just, well, so damn ugly.
I am with British cultural critic Stephen Bayley (thought of as one of the world's best-known commentators on modern culture) who this year launched 'What's that thing?', the Spectator's prize for bad public art. I couldn't do better than Bayley's definition of modern public art:
"Public art is crapola foisted on the incurious by the cynical and credulous."
He goes on, writing in The Spectator magazine, "Has public art ever achieved any level of popular approval or intellectual respect? It's rarely edifying. It is that ludicrous, annoying excrescence, reluctantly paid for by a guilty property developer or worried into existence by ambitious arts administrators with unemployed 'sculptors' or aesthetically-inclined welders on their books."
Bayley lists a number of reasons for a decline in public art - that we have no heroes, nor agreed values, and that crude caricature has been relied upon to appeal to the masses.
Jonathan Jones in the UK's Guardian newspaper is also appalled by some modern public art, and blames the Reformation which ransacked "a medieval artistic heritage rooted in shared beliefs, common symbols, and a popular visual language". Jones said that whereas once artistic richness that visitors to Italian cities adore could once be enjoyed in British cities, "now all we have is a blasted tree".
He was talking about a towering public art work in Merseyside (where I hail from) by artist Geoff Wood, a replica of a dead tree. Jones nails the problem with public art, it is ironically elitist. It may be easy for an art critic in say London to admire the work but the people of Merseyside have labelled it "a monstrosity" and it says little meaningful to or about them.
So I do not like Dr Morgan's proposed sculpture. Nor do I like the 8m high spinifex or the 130m long, 9m high pa structure on the Tauranga Eastern Link. I read that sculptor Regan Gentry wanted to "unite the natural and man-made environment and help personalise the location so people really connect with it as they are travelling through".
Personally I would have just rather look at the natural environment as it was.
And for the same reason I object to the felling of the two pohutakawa trees that would have been necessary to erect Dr Morgan's sculpture in the place where he wanted it.
"I didn't know you were a philistine," said one colleague.
Hopefully I am not. Disliking art that others may like doesn't make one a philistine. It is the beauty of art that it can both appeal and provoke.
Which is fine in your front room, or even in your front garden, but art imposed on me in a public space, chosen by others, I am not so sure about.
It can never really be a democratic process that pleases all. Even with a public art group, how could a small group of people know what will appeal to the public, and how could they speak for all of us?
When Regan Gentry's sculptures were revealed, comments on Facebook by some who expressed dislike for them were shut down by some in the art community who told them they didn't know what they were talking about. Perhaps reading about some of the context of the art can help one understand its intention, but taste is something subjective.
We shouldn't be dazzled by the fame or price of art, but whether it appeals. Knowing it's a famous sculpture doesn't make me like it any more than knowing Jamie Oliver prepared the pork belly - I still don't like it.
Bayley quotes Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker who writes, "I think it is perfectly legitimate to question whether public spaces and public funds are the right context for work that appeals to so few people - no matter how far it advances the concept of sculpture".
Despite all this it is not my dislike of the aesthetics of the sculpture that have me onside with the council decision.
For while I do not care for the sculpture, I respect that others may do, and if on that basis, Dr Morgan wanted to gift it to the city in a public space, then the city would be silly to refuse.
But it is the fact that Dr Morgan's gesture, while seemingly generous on the one hand, comes with a demand of where it should be located. The location of public art should be decided by a democratic process, not by those funding it.
Why not compromise so that the trees did not have to be felled? Removing the trees would be changing the landscape considerably. The council has a duty to preserve the city's treescape. The "take it or leave it" stance seems stubborn.
As Councillor Steve Morris says, if the council had approved the sculpture on the site Morgan wanted, it throws up a whole raft of issues given that the sculpture would be privately owned on public land, raising the question of whether it was public or private art.
It would also set a precedent for others to follow suit. Great you may say, more free public art funded by private house owners. But given the subjectivity of art, how would council be able to justify selecting one proposal over another? Structures of all shapes and sizes could start appearing all over the city.
Felling a tree to put a man-made structure in might sound insane enough, but I am sure there are people who could come up with madder proposals to put outside their house.
It doesn't seem right that people can undemocratically put up what they want in the name of art. Bad public art, whatever dollar worth is put upon it, is worse than no public art. In this case Dr Morgan's proposal did not in my opinion fulfil the role of public art to express community values and transform a landscape.
The natural landscape and the beauty of local architecture on Marine Parade wins any day on random man-made constructions that risk being those Bayley says "whose vapidity is matched only by its vanity".
Even if you like the sculpture, and I am sure there are many who do, its aesthetics aside, public art should be placed in public sites, there for everyone, and not held to ransom by those who fund it as to where it should be located.
For me, no beauty can match the ever-changing beauty and views of pohutakawa or any native tree viewed through the seasons.
God was a fine public artist, as visionary poet William Blake put it: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
So, as for cutting down my beloved trees, if Michaelangelo himself did turn up offering David in that exact spot, I would tell him to do it up the road where there were no trees.
