Lucky, lucky Ilfracombe - they'll spend the next 20 years staring at Damien Hirst's pregnant monstrosity

I'm definitely going private next time 

She carries a sword in one hand, she stands 65ft. tall, she's called Verity, andshe's apparently a "modern allegory of truth and justice". (In which case, I'm a two-bedroom maisonette in Solihull.) And she is being put in her place as I write this.

This disgustingly ugly statue is the work of Damien Hirst, who has lent it to Ilfracombe - a Victorian holiday resort in North Devon - for the next twenty years. It will stand on the pier, where the poor folk who live there and those with sufficiently strong stomachs to visit will be unable to avoid seeing it. Here's the view from another angle, which might not actually cause everyone who catches sight of it to hurl chunks (if they manage to look away quickly enough):

I've written before about our liberal establishment's babyish belief that sheer hugeness somehow imbues trashy, shallow works of art with SIGNIFICANCE (read it here). All it does, of course, is reveal the work's moral and emotional emptiness.

Verity's thuggish mundanity reminds my wife of the The Kiss, a deeply tawdry example of monumental ineptness outraging anyone of sensibility forced to visit St Pancras Station:

We fought a war to prevent fascist bullies bossing us about. That evidently didn't work. 

We stayed in Ilfracombe for a few days some three years' ago on our way back from Cornwall. It wasn't exactly the jumpingest burg I've ever visited, but it had its charms, including a series of quirky beaches reached via four man-made tunnels dug in the 1820s, quite a lot of handsomely confident Victorian and Edwardian seaside architecture, and a rather pleasant promenade, parts of which had evidently been recently modernised in a fairly inoffensive way. 

I initially assumed Ilfracombe had agreed to countenance Hirst's nauseating erection because the town has seen better days (to put it mildly) and probably needs all the publicity it can get. But then I remembered being repulsed by The Scallop, a fantastically unsuitable and unsympathetic piece of monumental sculpture by arch-pseud Maggi Hambling, which some idiot or other agreed should stand on the beach at Aldeburgh, a truly lovely and smugly well-off coastal town in Suffolk:

Why can't these awful, puffed-up, talentless wretches simply sod off and leave the rest of us in peace?