"Co-owner Andy Lopez said the yearly beauty pageant would not be returning," the piece continued.

" 'It was a great event and a nice part of the event for its time but we've all moved on…,' Lopez explained."

Although I never thought of the pageant as "a great event" or as something "nice" I was always drawn to it. For a newspaper reporter it was always a guaranteed source of colour and movement. Then, too, I always felt I was at the pageant (and at the whole annual jamboree of Summernats) as a kind of cross between a reporter and an anthropologist.

I have always loved and marvelled at Summernats, rejoicing in the way in which it brought such a refreshingly exotic tribe (the interstate vulgar!) into the sheltered, tightly-corseted and sadly under-tattooed world of bourgeois Canberra.

I never went to Miss Summernats' tournaments to ogle the young women. They were never "my type" and I dare say I never was theirs. And in any case I was at least as interested in the pageant's savage audience as in the plucky, painted, brazen competitors. With my notebook and my tape-recorder it was like being legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead among the Samoans, studying the strange rites of a fascinating culture.

It was not that one approved of the pageant (any more than an academic anthropologist approves of, say, headhunting, cannibalism or polygamy in the society he or she is studying) but that it did seem worthy of study.

After the pageant I would beetle back to the newsroom and hammer out a 600 word news story to enchant next morning's readers. But in my heart I would have preferred to write up the pageant experience in a long-form scholarly way for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Had Andy Lopez consulted me on this I think I would have counselled that, vulgar and debauched as the pageant was, it fitted nicely within Summernats' excitingly primitive ambience. Not every organisation could comfortably hold such an event (one struggles to imagine a Miss Yarralumla Residents' Association pageant or Miss Lake Burley Griffin Guardians pageant) but with Summernats it worked well. Banning it feels uncomfortably like the way in which moralising Christian missionaries have always interfered with the customs of happy heathens.

With what envy, as a champion of public art, your columnist reads of the bounteous state of public art in New York city.

Here in Canberra the government was quickly and easily intimidated by troglodytes' and philistines' reactions to Jon Stanhope's public art push of 2007-09. Scarcely anything big, bold and beautiful has been installed since then.

The fact that some of the enemies of the splendid Powerful Owl on Belconnen Way scoffed that it reminded them of a penis seems to have counted for a lot. But, surely, people who think they see penises everywhere shouldn't be listened to by governments but should be referred to psychological services.

Penis imaginers seem to be having no influence in mentally healthy New York City, where, The Economist magazine reports, "Today New York has more public art than any city in the world. The Parks Department alone now installs one artwork a week, and transportation agencies and neighbourhood groups have instituted their own programmes."

"Art has appeared on waterways, on traffic barriers and in tunnels. This year began with the unveiling of colourful mosaics by Chuck Close in the Second Avenue subway. It ends with Good Fences Make Good Neighbours by Ai Weiwei which consists of 300 sculptures and installations spread around the city."

The Economist explains that while the popularity of public art in New York has been powered by the ingenuity of artists, "there has always been something in it for the city".

For example "Mayor Bloomberg recognised that bold public art could drive investment and tourism". One particularly spectacular work commissioned by him drew 4m people, and these tourists generated over $250m. Meanwhile in New York public art is not being left to authorities alone and "the city's property developers have courted artists in order to give their projects cachet".

Public art has something in it for the city and also does wonders for the soul. The Economist sings that "Last year, a public-art project in New York had some unusual stars: pigeons. Duke Riley attached LEDs to homing pigeons and set them free at dusk on the Brooklyn waterfront. Using whistles and poles, he directed their movement like a conductor, orchestrating a mesmerising aerial dance above the East River called Fly by Night. In Riley's hands, the birds, an urban nuisance, became creatures of beauty which made us see the city with fresh eyes. No gallery could provide such a rich platform."

Canberra, enough of our public art timidity! Let us (hang the expense!) bring Duke Riley here at once to conceive something big, bold and beautiful for us. Whatever he does will remind a few philistines of a penis but the rest of us will find it mesmerising and will see our city with fresh eyes.