Tampa Public Mood Ring by Will Pappenheimer and Chipp Jansen, courtesy Tampapublicmoodring.com.

Yes, this weekend also marks the last chance to view Lights On Tampa 2009 installations downtown. If you’re tuning in to media coverage of the Super Bowl this week, you may already have seen Will Pappenheimer and Chipp Jansen’s Tampa Public Mood Ring—located in Cotanchobee Park—during a local news broadcast, on ESPN or (so I’m told) on the Today Show. The sculpture, which allows visitors to Tampapublicmoodring.com to “rate” their mood in response to Super Bowl related-news by leaving a comment, picking an emoticon and choosing a color that changes the hue of lights atop the steel ring for 30 seconds (watch via live webcam), has been getting a fair amount of media play. Last night while driving, I even heard a commercial on 104.7 FM (yes, the 70s station—go ahead and judge me, I don’t care) promoting the sculpture. The only problem? It wasn’t identified as a work of art.

The radio spot did mention on multiple occasions the sponsor of the sculpture—Gerdau Ameristeel, whose executive offices are located in Tampa and who provided the materials and labor for the physical sculpture’s construction. (Conceptual labor and programming were performed by the artists.) And Lights On Tampa got a quick nod at the beginning of the commercial. At the spot’s conclusion, listeners were invited to “vote to make your team’s colors light up the sky” or something very similar—but at no time were Pappenheimer and Jansen named, and to my recollection the sculpture was never referred to as a sculpture, an artwork or “Tampa Public Mood Ring,” its official title.

Which is all a bit strange and, to my thinking, either unethical or just disturbingly disingenuous. The TPMR, which wears its Las Vegas-strip style populism (where public sculpture meets bling?) on its sleeve, has not been the recipient of much love from the local arts community. Just in my informal encounters with artists and arts professionals, the project generally seems to inspire a combination of knee-jerk dismissal and vaguely scandalized embarrassment. Horror of horrors, there’s just something about its larger-than-life and too-commercial sculptural form—not to mention its unrepentantly cheesy and simple-to-use website—that violates the highfalutin conventions of fine art. (This giant steel ring topped with a glowing football a pleasure to behold? Somewhere Edmund Burke is rolling in his grave…again.)

For my part, the more I heard about the project in advance, the more I feared that LOT would have a public relations disaster on its hands as local newspaper columnists snarkily tore the TPMR apart. (Never happened.) ‘Only in Tampa…,’ a city that already shoulders no small chip about the diversity and seriousness of its cultural offerings—that’s the nervous self-consciousness that motivates rejections of the sculpture, IMO. Meanwhile, the ring has emerged as one of LOT’s most interesting offerings by virtue of its shockingly earnest attempts to engage an unconventional audience (football fandom, for starters) and corporate collaborators (who threaten, in effect, to hijack the piece). However you want to describe their work– digital, relational, interactive– Pappenheimer and Jansen have not shied from taking serious risks.

[More tomorrow Monday?]