Withering Glance art-walks Nicollet Mall

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.

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.

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