ABOVE: views of Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, unveiled recently in London.

The Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square has only recently come to our notice, although it has been going strong for several years already. But its most recent reinvention is the one that has caught the attention of commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. “Fourth Plinth” refers, with lovable anglo literality, to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, where a rich gent many years ago paid to put up the base but ran out of money to put a statue on top of it. Only in the last few years have Londoners been able to enjoy a rotating series of temporary sculptures on the Fourth Plinth, paid for by the city and changing about every 18 months.

The lastest piece to occupy the hot seat is Alison Lapper Pregnant, an outsize marble sculpture of Alison Lapper, a disabled English artist who was born with no arms and malformed legs. Marc Quinn, the sculptor, took a full-body cast of Ms. Lapper while she was pregnant with her now-five-year-old son, Parys. On September 15, the sculpture was unveiled to public acclaim and critical sniffiness—art heroizing the disabled does have a certain unavoidable Chicken Soup for the Soul sentimentality about it—but most people, Canada’s Heather Mallick included, are thrilled and vocal about it. Mallick also makes it a hook on which to hang a column about bad Canadian public art.

LINK: Rabble.ca > Why do we have such bad public art?