The Control Yuan has censured the Ministry of Culture following a probe into claims that installations of public art have been monopolized by a few agents.
The Control Yuan’s Committee on Educational and Cultural Affairs on Jan. 11 passed an investigative report submitted by Control Yuan members Fan Sun-lu (范巽綠), Su Li-chung (蘇麗瓊) and Lin Sheng-fong (林盛豐) and forwarded the report to government agencies for review, the Control Yuan said in a press release yesterday.
The government has been
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
promoting public art installations for 25 years, spending about NT$9.93 billion (US$316.73 million) to complete 5,126 works in 2,455 projects as of 2021, it said.
However, the installations drew extensive criticism, including that they ended up as garbage, destroyed the beauty of the environment, wasted money and were monopolized by a few agents, it said.
The Regulations on the Installation of Public Art (公共藝術設置辦法) are becoming more complicated and many of the administrative agents involved in public art installation projects lacked expertise in the field, the members said.
From 2011 to 2021, 711 out of 1,517 projects — 47.4 percent — were handled by agents,using about 68.28 percent of all funding, statistics provided by the ministry showed, it said.
In 2021 alone, 84 out of 141 projects were handled by agents, with four agents handling 58 projects, 41 percent, it said.
Some agents had unusual connections with the company that won the bid for the project, but the ministry failed to look into the situation, it added.
There are only 366 members in the ministry’s database of experts and academics, unevenly distributed across expertise, and no new additions were made for years, it said.
Some members are heads of agencies so they would be personally involved in a project while reviewing other projects at the same time, it said.
The promotion of public art had seen some success at first, including the project along Taipei’s Dunhua S Road and Dunhua N Road
and the Dome of Light at the Formosa Boulevard Station in
Kaohsiung, it said.
The ministry failed to adhere to its objective and move with the times to nurture young artists, respond to environmental challenges with innovative solutions or demonstrate sustainable values, which resulted in a lack of public artworks with Taiwanese characteristics, it said.
The Ministry of National Defense even allowed its agencies to import unfinished products from China, it said, citing examples that were found in the Amis Longshan (龍山) Camp, Yuqin (育勤) Camp and Gueiren (歸仁) Camp, it said.
The Ministry of Culture should come up with solutions to these practices as they are not conducive to the development of public art, it said.
The Culture and Arts Reward and Promotion Act (文化藝術獎助及促進條例) requires public buildings and major construction projects to allocate no less than 1 percent of the total cost of the project for public art, which is a stipulation rarely seen in advanced countries, it said.
The Ministry of Culture should seek opinions from experts and refer to foreign practices while planning to amend the act to avoid prescribing unreasonably high budgets, it said.
The Control Yuan also suggested that the ministry establish dedicated and professional teams to provide professional guidance to public art installation projects to prevent any party from obtaining improper benefits.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
Ferry operators are planning to provide a total of 1,429 journeys between Taiwan proper and its offshore islands to meet increased travel demand during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, the Maritime and Port Bureau said yesterday. The available number of ferry journeys on eight routes from Saturday next week to Feb. 2 is expected to meet a maximum transport capacity of 289,414 passengers, the bureau said in a news release. Meanwhile, a total of 396 journeys on the "small three links," which are direct ferries connecting Taiwan's Kinmen and Lienchiang counties with China's Fujian Province, are also being planned to accommodate
RSS