Art in public spaces should be decided by the people

Art in public spaces really gets the juices flowing: informed critical juices, deeply felt uncritical ones, preciously held sheer prejudice. What matters is that the presence of a work of art in a public space - "our" space, "free" space perhaps - invites a feeling of ownership, of involvement of a very direct kind.

Despite the huge numbers who visit galleries and museums, most people don't go. If they do, the convention of the art gallery is that the work is entitled to be there and your right to question it is correspondingly limited. But in the street where you live, the supermarket where you shop, the square where you sit, you have a right to state an opinion.

And do we have opinions! At a debate at the National Gallery this week, organised by the University of the Arts London, the panellists had to name their best and worst piece of public art. Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, named the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner as his favourite; The Boy with a Dolphin at the Chelsea end of Albert Bridge as the worst. Joan Bakewell, Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, chose Antony Gormley's Another Place on Liverpoool's Crosby Beach as her best; the 8ft marble statue of Mrs Thatcher as the worst. The 2006 Turner Prize nominee, Mark Titchner, thought Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave the most resonant, and Industry and Genius in Centenary Square, Birmingham the worst. The critic Giles Waterfield saw the Berlin Memorial to the Nazi book burning campaign - rows of empty shelves in a glass covered underground cell - as the most haunting, and pre-empted others by naming and shaming The Meeting Place at St Pancras as the worst, a choice greeted by the audience with loud cheers.

My own choices were Gormley's haunting skyline figures on London's city roofs - in part because they were not permanent - and the infamous Diana Fountain in Hyde Park as a piece that undermines space and location rather than enhances it. So we all have views and we all care. And everyone is going to care about the choice of the work for the £2m Angel of the South to be put up on the site of the future Ebbsfleet development in Kent. Judging by responses to last week's announcement of the five shortlisted artists' proposals - ranging from Mark Wallinger's heroic White Horse to Richard Deacon's cerebral metal polyhedrons - the public art in public spaces debate will reignite with an entirely welcome intensity.

One of the best things about the Ebbsfleet project is that the shortlist will be put out for comment in the nearby Bluewater shopping mall. It is a long time since shoppers were asked their views on anything to do with art; but as with the public consultation over the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, all the signs are that the process hugely consolidated support for the idea, and for the individual pieces themselves, making due allowances for personal responses.

Talking to the public must be one lesson to be learned in the decade since Antony Gormley's Angel of the North drew our attention to the notion that a symbol of a place becomes part of its identity, both summing it up and driving it forward.

Given that art in public spaces is increasingly fashionable, it has never been so important to make it better. There are warning signals aplenty about uncertain quality ranging from our streets being filled with a "sheer proliferation of Frankenstein monster memorials" (Tim Knox, Sir John Soane's Museum) to "a lot of public art is gunge" (Gormley).

One of the problems is that public art is such an amorphous category. There is certainly no single solution to the question of what makes a successful piece. But a commission is more likely to succeed if its purpose and function are questioned at the start.

Is the work to be a sculpture or an installation? Is it for an existing community with an existing identity, or a new community whose identity can be influenced by the commission? Is it to be permanent or temporary? If temporary, what follows? Is the commission primarily a sop to a developers' conscience, a blatant attempt to gloss over a basically mediocre development? How is the community to be involved? How is the artist involved? What is the process for choosing a short list of artists for the commission - if this is the route chosen? And finally, who chooses the actual commission?

One of the lessons of the St Pancras horror is that the committee decided it was "inappropriate" for the boy and girl to be kissing. Apart from the intrinsic stupidity of the observation (isn't travelling to Paris all about romance?) - the committee was second-guessing the artist, which they were absolutely unqualified to do.

There is a further danger. It is often asserted that Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum "regenerated Bilbao". As common is the assertion that the Angel of the North regenerated the north east of England. Neither is true as stated - Gehry's truly iconic building came as the climax to a huge programme of investment in the city's infrastructure of which it became the public expression. Similarly, the interplay between a huge totemic metal structure and the economic revival of the north east of England is far more complex than a crude "put up the art and the economy will follow" proposition. Anyone considering a public art commission, especially one intended to lead or to signal the transformation of a region or an environment, should be cautious about expecting too much.

Yet we should expect a great deal of a public work of art at the level where it really matters - in our interaction with the places where we live, work and play. They should be enjoyable; we should be cheered by what we see, perplexed perhaps, made curious certainly; a daily encounter should not become dull routine. And there is a deep reason why we respond to such objects and images as we do.

It was the artist Michael Craig-Martin who observed this week that, "most space is undifferentiated. Once you have a sculpture there, you see the rest of the space differently." He was talking about the impact of the Gormley figures on Crosby Beach, but it applies to urban space - often featureless and undifferentiated just as strongly.

Public art at its best helps us to see the rest of the space differently. It is an extraordinary quality, a remarkable opportunity and a huge prize for anyone commissioning public art. Which is why it must be good, and why the more we all take part in the process of choosing, the healthier it will be for art as a whole.