Making a statement is what art is supposed to be all about these days. Yet the BBC has been strangely reluctant to provide commentary about the sculpture on which it has spent £60,000 of licence fee payers’ money. So what, exactly, is Tracey Emin’s bird on a 4-metre pole trying to say? “The early bird gets the wonga”? “Nice bird, shame about her Bed”? Or “Auntie’s up a gum tree”?

Ms Emin’s talent for making money is admirable, whatever emotions some of her work may inspire. The BBC’s penchant for wasting money — in this case on a project which has no link to any BBC programme or building — is artless to say the least. Its publicist has freely admitted to having invented excuses which are only “plausible up to a point”. The excuse that the work will be on public view for a considerable time may have faint merit if you are standing outside Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. But if you are at home on the sofa, you may wonder why the BBC did not simply present its own “unmade desk” as its contribution to Liverpool art, using its Public Art Committee — the one that has no clear rationale for the purchase — as a living installation.

At a time of “supposed cost-cutting”, as the BBC publicist perceptively describes it, splashing out on a supposed artwork is a fine example of Auntie feathering her own nest. The Public Art Committee may be greatly contributing to the takings of BBC coffee bars in White City. But this bird is not the successor to the magnificent Eric Gill sculptures at Broadcasting House, however the BBC blusters. It is a piece of budgetary excess that is not modern, just traditionally bird-brained.