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.
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