The move to get back into public art follows a decision in 2012 to slash the budget and put on hold any installation of new works while the Dunedin City Council's policy was reviewed.
The programme was one of the casualties that year of a council cost-saving drive to keep rates down in the face of shortfalls in dividends.
It followed public uproar about the last work installed in Dunedin, Harbour Mouth Molars, in Portsmouth Dr, and a local political storm around the controversial Haka Peep Show, a phallic piece of public art in the Octagon.
But at a full council meeting yesterday, there appeared to be a desire among councillors to dip the city's toe back into those waters.
The meeting heard from Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG) director Cam McCracken on the arts and culture department's ''Rethinking Public Art in Dunedin'' report, written by former DPAG director John McCormack and Shanghai University professor and Public Art Co-ordination Centre executive director Jin Jiangbo.
Mr McCracken said in his report there had been no council-funded art since 2011.
The report identified opportunities to link existing and possible new public art precincts or clusters in the Octagon, the warehouse precinct, Steamer Basin and harbour mouth to the Otago Peninsula via Portobello Rd.
It suggested a new trust to drive delivery of a public art programme from council funding, but also from its own fundraising.
The council would be supported to ''embed'' public art in capital works.
New ideas could come from ''a public art lab'' where people could brainstorm, test and refine ideas.
Temporary public art could be encouraged.
Cr Aaron Hawkins said world class public art was essential to Dunedin, and the city had not commissioned nearly enough recently.
Cr David Benson-Pope said it was surprising a Unesco City of Literature was almost bereft of public art.
''We haven't done enough, and we haven't done enough for far too long,'' he said.
Mayor Dave Cull said he had long thought there was either no public art, or controversy about public art. But public art was important in showing Dunedin was a confident city and an international city.
The council voted unanimously to support a public art framework that linked to other council strategies, and to look at governance and funding options by April next year.
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Comments
It is great to see the council is prepared to re-visit the funding of public art works, however this will only be successful if they recognize their inadequacies with past public art commissions. The so called "uproar" about the "Harbour molars" would have never existed if the council followed the artist's contract of placement for the sculpture. The disastrous 2014 public sculpture commission for the botanical gardens "worm" is purely the responsibility of the council's abysmal processes of tendering for public art works. In short, the council needs to model the practice of established and successful public art commissioning - there are plenty of examples to follow, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland not to mention regional centres like Nelson, Mt Cook, Palmerston North and Tauranga, to name a few. l