Molar rage: it's all about the abscess

The vitriol being squirted in the direction of the Harbour Mouth Molars sculptures has been reminding me of Henry, the Southland Museum and Art Gallery tuatara.

Old Henry was known for his aggression, and for years, his keeper had to keep him isolated because he was inclined to bite off the tails of other tuatara that came near. Not surprisingly, he was also excluded from the museum's captive-breeding programme.

Then, a few years back, Henry's keeper discovered the beast had a nasty tumour growing where the sun don't shine. The museum had that surgically removed, and suddenly, the sun did shine for Henry. He proved capable of love for his fellow tuatara, he became friendly and even amorous, and, at the emergency-number age of 111, he became a father for the first time.

It turned out the true source of his aggression had been the tumour, which had been causing him discomfort, and not the other reptiles at all.

Similarly, it seems as if the observers who have taken such severe exception to the six large molars on Portsmouth Dr are really troubled by something further along the harbour jaw line.

Could it be the Forsyth Barr Stadium is like a large, sore (and, regrettably, growing) dental abscess, and that it is the true cause of the citizens' rage? Oh! What gruesomely wonderful stories my Australian cousin Kylie, a dental assistant, can tell about abscesses of the mouth. But that is beside the point.

If you look at the way letters to the editor and comments on this website apparently relate to Regan Gentry's sculptural installation in Oamaru stone, but frequently allude to the stadium and its cost, then you start to suspect that is where it really hurts.

Financially, this abscess theory stacks up. The sum spent on the molars, $45,000, represents a finger-lickin' steal for the city. In their hearts, the detractors must know that. It's much less than you'd expect a city to pay for a biggish public art work.

It's one year's salary for one average New Zealand worker; not the kind of sum that could otherwise be used to cure some aching community need, such as South Dunedin's need for a library, or South Dunedin's need to be spared from the rising sea.

If you were lucky, you could get a children's playground for $45,000. I prefer the molars installation, which is a sort of un-garish playground for the imagination, and which can be enjoyed as much by grown-ups as by sprogs. Would anyone under normal circumstances complain about the modest cost of a playground?

Meanwhile, the sum spent on the abscess, or stadium, $200 million, represents a finger-lickin' steal from the city. Now that's a sum that could have cured several aching community needs (well, if it were actual money and not all debt). It's a feverish, inconceivable sum, really: no wonder it is causing people so much pain.

Pain, and quite possibly a poisoning. Aesthetic taste is one thing: some people will like to look at the Harbour Mouth Molars, and some people will not. But I wonder if some are incapable even of seeing the work with clear eyes, so much are they suffering from the toxicity of that stadium.

I've heard, for example, some folk argue the teeth are not anatomically correct and therefore are not to be admired. Quick, call a séance because someone forgot to tell Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, our own Fanny Hodgkins, Bacon, Turner, and - just to chuck in a sculptor - Giacometti, that things have to look precisely lifelike in order to constitute decent art.

No, that objection just sounds like one born of the Henry syndrome. A tumour in the rear, an abscess in the mouth, a stadium on Awatea St: some underlying complaint that is causing a general prevailing rage.

It's a real shame if that is the case, not least because the city's newest piece of public-owned art deserves an unpoisoned appraisal, but also, simply, because people deserve to be able to live their lives without chronic pain.