The “free-for-all” in tasteless, poorly executed public artworks must be halted, museum and gallery chiefs say.

Marjorie Trusted, senior curator of sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, said that many commissions were “disappointing, old-fashioned and awkward” and Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, dismissed them as “horrors” – “Frankenstein monster memorials”.

Mr Knox ridiculed the statue of Lloyd George in Parliament Square, likened The Monument to the Unknown Construction Worker near the Tower of London to “a gigantic Village People-style navvy” and mocked the embracing couple at St Pancras station as “truly horrific”, lizard-like figures the size of a terraced house.

Calling for artistic controls to be imposed on such commissions, he added: “In the Victorian era and in the early 20th century there was great confidence and world-class artists were used. But today that confidence has gone and the sculptors are not the world’s best.

“This free-for-all needs to be regulated and I’m worried about the sheer proliferation of these Frankenstein monsters.” Lobby groups, he said, were deciding that they needed a statue to commemorate someone and pressurising the authorities into erecting a memorial. “Over the last few years we’ve seen tens of new sculptures erected in the centre of the city. It’s almost reached epidemic proportions. These are not sculptures by well-known blue-chip artists because there don’t seem to be many of those.”

His concerns were echoed by the sculptor Michael Sandle, a Royal Academician, who said: “I would rather there was no public art than bad public art.” Attending a symposium on public sculpture along with the “functionaries” who have created an industry around public art commissions, Mr Sandle was shocked by one of the latest proposals – “a giant, hideous, badly drawn sculpture” that would destroy an 18th-century vista.

Depressed by the administrator singing its praises, he said: “Ignorant people are sticking the stuff up. The word is ‘regeneration’. That is the mantra. But a lot of artists involved in this don’t seem to understand the language. Nor do they understand scale. If you’re going to put something in a public space you have to think carefully about it – and not just stick up any old thing with no sense of space or history.”

Richard Shone, editor of The Burl-ington Magazine and an art historian, complained of the infestation of public places by statues and memorials. He called the statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square “crudely sculpted” and the New Zealand War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner a “bristlingly unlovely installation in one of the most public sites in London”. Westminster City Council, which is responsible for the statuary of Central London, should enforce stricter controls, he said.

A Westminster spokesman said the council was concerned about the proliferation of statues and memorials on its streets – there are now more than 300. It is stipulating that someone can only be commemorated in bronze or stone if they have made a serious contribution to society.

Asked about the quality of commissions, Robert Davis, one of the council’s ruling Conservative group, said that everything was in the eye of the beholder. Westminster had reached “saturation point” with statues and memorials, he added, criticising the Government for jumping on the band-wagon by suggesting more. Arts, times2, pages 12, 13

In the public eye

— The £400,000 statue of Nelson Mandela by the late Ian Walters was unveiled in Parliament Square in August after a five-year row over its location. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, had wanted it in Trafalgar Square but this was blocked by Westminster City Council

— The “bristlingly unlovely” New Zealand War Memorial – known as The Southern Stand – consists of 16 cross-shaped slabs of bronze up to 4.5m high and weighing up to 700kg. It was designed by John Hardwick-Smith and Paul Dibble

— The Monument to the Unknown Construction Worker, 2006, by Alan Wilson, was also criticised by Tim Knox as being derived from Michelangelo’s David – and in fact has the word “Dave” clipped to its belt. It was commissioned by the construction union UCATT and cost £100,000

— The Meeting Place – the embracing couple at St Pancras Station – by Paul Day cost almost £1 million. Among Richard Shone’s retorts were that it was “dreary and mournful” and “as romantic as a couple who have just been refused a mortgage”

Sources; Times database; BBC; The Art Newspaper

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