Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Who needs a concert, a movie or a happy hour when we can meet up for a winter's evening at a Nicollet Mall PowerPoint?

RN: If this public meeting were a Broadway show, it would have closed out of town. Enough with the facts and figures and let's get to the sketches already.

CP: Oooh-kay. The project has a public-art component, headed by a public-art czar. Did we even know either of these existed? It sounds like they may spend close to $1 million to commission some new art.

RN: Adjusted for inflation, that's less than the do-re-mi devoted to art when the mall was redone in the early 1990s. Should any of the existing works live to see the mall's third incarnation?

CP: One of them already kicked the bucket: the abstract stainless steel sculpture-slash-water-feature by Carl Nesjar in front of the former Neiman Marcus. After a short life, it was deemed incapacitated by water and ice and leaking and whatnot. Now it's a giant planter.

RN: If that doesn't summarize the dreary "Dynasty"-era mall remake, nothing does. To me, Texas sculptor Brad Goldberg's overscale stone urns in front of the Target store are imaginative grave markers for downtown's long-gone Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma stores.

CP: When we checked, passers-by had gone ahead and thrown trash into the Paul Bunyan vases.

RN: Nice. Your thoughts on sculptor Elliot Offner's gigantic cast-bronze representations of a blue heron, a loon and a sage grouse? The original cost was $350,000. That's $610,000 in 2014 dollars.

CP: File under "Not fond of." Why does so much bird art ignore the notion of resembling the actual birds in nature? Or in a commonly available bird book.

RN: I think they would look lovely in, say, Eden Prairie Center.

CP: Is there something in the mall's current art inventory that you are going to the mat to save?

RN: I hereby nominate sculptor Jack Nelson's 21-foot glass-walled clock, which currently graces Peavey Plaza. It just might be the sole remaining artifact from the original Lawrence Halprin-designed mall, and I will chain myself to it if that's what it takes to keep the bulldozers at bay.

CP: It has a sort of Willy Wonka charm, but it also appears so decrepit that I'm guessing the city will have to shell out at least 50 grand to get it running again.

RN: That's one-tenth of 1 percent of the Nu-mall's $50 million budget. The pavement-level artworks should probably survive, right?

CP: You can hardly go wrong leaving the George Morrison sidewalk mosaic in front of the library. And I find the blobby shapes at the other end of the mall, created by Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken, and embossed with short poems, to be a cool surprise.

RN: Agreed. I also sort of love the 100-plus bronze manhole covers. Artist Kate Burke imprinted them with Minnesota imagery: loons, lady slippers, walleyes. They're cute, in a Convention and Visitors Bureau kind of way.

CP: If they toss them out for the new mall, you should get one for your home bathroom.

E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com

Twitter: @claudepeck and @RickNelsonStrib