Article: Putting new polish on a public-art debate; Reinstallation of a St. Paul sculpture renews a decades-old question: Is it beauty, or a blot?(VARIETY)

Byline: MARY ABBE; STAFF WRITER

When bad things happen to good sculptures, they can end up like those abandoned rowboats that wash up on northern Minnesota lawns -- filled with petunias and surrounded by white-painted rocks.

Until recently that was pretty much the fate of "Protagoras," an often controversial 4-ton sculpture of folded steel that sat for 30 years in front of the federal courthouse in downtown St. Paul. Wayward styrofoam cups and litter blew into its crevices, and a well-meaning but misguided gardener tried to domesticate the thing by ringing it with colorful annuals and creeping vines that shimmied up its rusty sides.

Now the trash and posies are ...

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