On drawings and photographs, it looks almost funny. At the end of the stripped classical facade of the Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair an interwar building originally designed as a garage sits a cubic, humanoid figure occupying most of one wing of the structure. There has been some attempt to integrate it with the stone facade but the gap is still obvious. The figure appears to be squatting, folding its arms and staring, blank-faced, like a muted, reduced version of an ancient Assyrian sculpture, hieratic, pompous and faintly silly. It's even sillier when you realise that this is not merely a sculpture but actually a hotel room and not by any sculptor, but the sculptor who has presided over the past 20 years of public art in Britain: Antony Gormley.
Such a radical shift from the nominally public, all those enigmatic figures lurking in "regenerated" public spaces, to the spectacularly private a luxury Mayfair hotel room as sculpture may, if nothing else, be indicative of the directions certain kinds of art are going to have to take now that public funding has been switched off. You can stay, for the expected exorbitant fee, inside the Beaumont Hotel sculpture; the bedroom is in the head. The public may get to see inside on open days, but otherwise this is strictly for those curious enough to want to stay for the night inside Antony Gormley. It's quite the metamorphosis for an artist who has been so prominent in actual public space.
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