Large sculptures beside new roads and public buildings are a familiar sight, but is this the best way to spend millions of pounds allocated to public art?
This will be raised at a conference in Sligo next week, which will be attended by a number of international speakers.
Some £2 million a year is spent on public art. Funding has increased dramatically since the introduction of a requirement that 1 per cent of the total cost of State-funded building projects be allocated to an accompanying art work.
These include town and village renewal schemes, roads and new government buildings.
The "Placing Art" conference is jointly hosted by Sligo County Council and Sligo Corporation and will focus on public art in rural, coastal and small urban environments.
The public art co-ordinator in Sligo, Ms Mary McDonagh, said the aim was to have an international exchange of ideas. The conference also ties in with a pilot project in Sligo, for six commissions.
In each case the local community was engaged in the selection or creation of the art work.
She said the aim was "to try to break the mould of public art", and there was a need for more imagination in commissioning work.
"Money is generally spent on large permanent sculptures, a monumental type of work, but that doesn't always reflect what is going on in the artistic community," she said.
Ms McDonagh was the first public art co-ordinator to be appointed by a local authority in the State, and recommendations which could be used by other county councils are being drawn up as part of the Sligo project.
"A lot of local authorities have been commissioning in a one-off or ad-hoc kind of way, and there have been no structures to make sure it is done in a coherent way," she said.
This meant that a piece could be commissioned simply because an official liked a particular artist's work.
Speakers at the conference next Tuesday and Wednesday include the Turner Prize-winning British sculptor, Antony Gormley, and Prof Luke Gibbons of Notre Dame University in the US.
A public art project on Achill Island will be compared to one in Japan, which will be explained by Yuji Akimoto of the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum.
The conference will be at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery.