Why we can’t escape the rise of ‘plop art’ | Jonathan Jones

Rachel Whiteread is right – Britain is full of bad public art. But debates on the subject are irreconcilable: one person’s plop is another’s poetic vision

The sculptor Rachel Whiteread has come up with a new art term: “plop art” What can it mean? Is she cocking a snook at the American artist Paul McCarthy, whose controversial sculptures include a giant inflatable poo, perhaps? You wouldn’t want one of those plopping down in front of your house.

But no, Whiteread was talking about arbitrary acts of public sculpture in a more general sense. “I’m not a great fan of what I call ‘plop art’, where you plop a piece of work down where it doesn’t bear any relationship to anything else,” she said as her cast of the inside of a chicken shed went on display outside Tate Britain. Too much public art in Britain is, she suggests, “ill thought-out and put in places that it shouldn’t necessarily be.”

Related: Rachel Whiteread exhibition review – the secret life of things

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