Deborah Orr: To deride public art is to ignore the benefits it can bring

Since despising "public art" is such a popular pastime, it was endearingly naive of Antony Gormley, one of the most distinguished of Britain's sculptors, to declare last week that much of it was, indeed, rubbish. Inevitably, his cri de coeur was greeted with many responses suggesting that (ha!) his own work was the most egregiously offensive on current display. It is hard to feel too sorry for Gormley, even though he is a friend. If one has to be the victim of anything, it is surely best to fall foul of one's own success.

Nobody reviles publicly funded art quite as magnificently as the Telegraph's polemicist-in-chief, Simon Heffer. In a recent column he wrote, with regard to Arts Council funding, of "people whose cocaine-fringed snouts will now plunge into this vast, taxpayer-filled trough – failed writers, failed composers, failed actors, failed painters, failed 'performance artists', all of whom feel they have as much entitlement to a welfare state as the severely disabled, the elderly, widows and orphans".

Much as I admire Heffer's barnstormingly simple certainty, I cannot agree with him. It would be a civilised world indeed in which the commercial failure of creativity was an indicator of its poor quality. But the mountain of tat that has been eagerly snapped up over the past decade by private collectors is enough on its own to convince me that this is far from being the case.

Being a good artist does not guarantee commercial success – far from it – just as being a bad artist does not preclude it. As for useful artists – who may be good at their work but not brilliant, yet gifted with the ability to infect others with their love of their vocation – it is culturally limiting to suggest that there is no place for them except the classroom.

When the artist known as Bob and Roberta Smith admitted that he was paid a sum similar to his earnings in the whole of the year before to be the "lead artist" in a community art project in the Thames Gateway, it was a fair bet that the sum was by most standards quite modest. And it could be argued that his project, entitled Art U Need, and financed by the visual arts development agency Commissions East, produced good things for struggling people that mere money is not usually expected to buy.

Bob and Roberta secured five sites of social deprivation in the Thames Gateway and hired five artists to work on them. In each, the artists arrived to find divided, suspicious and fearful communities, and departed leaving happier and more cohesive ones.

Lucy Harrison worked in Canvey Island, and discovered a long-standing gulf between the older residents and the "incomers" who arrived with the new development built after a huge flood in 1953. Enlisting the various residents to assemble an alternative history of the place that concentrated on "fragments and anecdotes that would not usually be found in history books, but provide and insight into the way a place finds its identity", she erected beautiful placards (painted by a local signwriter, Bob the Brush) at places of quirky interest, and established a walking club, called the Rendezvous Club, where people could meet and explore together. It has now established itself as a popular monthly community event.

Angela Mason, working in Northlands Park on the outskirts of Basildon, was troubled to find a population of about 10,000 with no community focal point, not a pub, not a café, not a launderette. Staging events every week for three months, on unlikely spots, she helped local people to establish such traditions as a "speaker's corner" on a scrap of green space. This idea built as the months went on, with speakers becoming increasingly vociferous, and prompted residents to visit Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, for tips.

Milika Muritu found that the neighbours living in the tower blocks on the Queensway estate in Southend didn't even know there was a communal drying room on each floor. By designing Perspex "streams" to be fitted to the windows of the drying rooms, so that they cascaded down the length of the buildings, she awakened interest in the rooms, got people talking to each other and prodded the council into fixing the lighting in the rooms so that the Perspex shapes could shine out in the night.

Is this sort of thing really a waste of public money? Or is it a worthwhile and lovely service that can put the spring back in the step of capable people who have come to believe that their efforts are hopeless? The annoying thing about deprivation is that money alone cannot cure it. A little creative thinking can make public money go a great deal further.

Bob and Roberta was asked on a local radio show how much the project was costing, and responded that it would cost "the price of two kidney machines", which would "get ruined if you left them out on a roundabout anyway". Kidney machines are good for the blood. But you can quicken many a heart with engaging and unconventional art.

* Mad Men, set in a 1960s US ad agency, is my new favourite thing on the telly. This week, we got a bird's eye view of what it was like to be a new secretary when it was taken as read that every man in the company had a right and a duty to join the race to bed her. Meanwhile, agency alpha male Don Draper (second left, above) had trouble at home. His own unhappy wife had gone into therapy because her hands kept going numb, the sensation culminating in her crashing a car full of their young children. None of this got her husband wondering whether his affair might be part of the trouble, but he took the precaution of getting the therapist to call him secretly after her sessions to report on what his patient had been saying anyway. Draper started thinking about "what women want" only when he realised it would be wives who were buying their menfolk's deodorant, and that this would be useful knowledge in mounting an ad campaign. Could Mad Men be the keen dissection of the interplay between female emancipation and market expansion that has been needed for so long? I have high hopes.

A little bit late for discretion on this one

The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has intervened to halt the deportation of Mahdi Kazemi, the gay Iranian whose boyfriend was hanged. The Government has argued that while Iran does have the death penalty for homosexuality, the "crime" is not zestfully pursued, so gays who go about their business quietly are not at risk. So they may still send Kazemi back.

Since Kazemi is now a Europe-wide cause célèbre, I think it can be assumed that there is little chance of him going home and conducting his private life so very discreetly.

George Galloway does not agree, and says the whole diplomatic incident has been got up to make Iran look bad. Iran, he claims, doesn't hang people for being gay.

It hanged Kazemi's boyfriend for "sex crimes against young men". Isn't any erotic exchange between young men a "sex crime" in a country where it's illegal to be queer? Galloway is reluctant to elaborate on that. Oddly, though, he doesn't think Iran is quite so great that Kazemi should be sent back either. Mass of contradictions, that fellow.

* I hurried my children last Saturday to the final weekend of the strongly recommended Wellcome Foundation exhibition, Sleeping and Dreaming. There I was, struggling to remember why I should be troubled that Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou was on a loop for all to see, when my 10-year-old copped the terrible scene, ruthlessly excised from my memory, in which a living eyeball is slit with a cut-throat razor. Being Scared to Go to Bed, and Having Terrible Nightmares might have been a more usefully parent-friendly title for the show.

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