The bean counting opponents of light rail have never been able to appreciate this. They know nothing about art. Culture is wasted on them.

And sure enough, now that one actually sees them, the Fabulous 14 trams, being trialled, beetling to and fro along Northbourne Avenue, my fancy is vindicated. Over and above what light rail achieves as a practical people mover there is something about it, in its Civic to Gungahlin manifestation that gives our city (still in so many other ways bogged down in the olden days of the 1960s) a swish, 21st-century feel. The vermilion trams give metropolitan gaiety and enable the city to at last swagger a little.

The 14 Light Rail Vehicles (LRVs) were made in Spain by Constructions y Auxiliary de Ferrocariles and for me are works of art just as surely as if our National Gallery had somehow (at many, many times the cost of these LRV bargains) bought our city 14 Spanish masterpieces, seven, say, by Velazquez, and seven by Goya.

Mention of art and of the National Gallery of Australia brings me to the way in which the usual fungal philistines (so many of them, predictably, writing to The Canberra Times from Yarralumla) are complaining about the giant melting wax candle sculpture that has just gone on display at the gallery.

They, the philistines (who can be relied upon to anyway dislike all modern sculpture, whether it melts or endures) yodel that $1 million (the reputed costs of Urs Fischer’s towering Francesco 2017) is wasted on a work of art that is going to melt away to nothing.

Even if Francesco actually did melt away to nothing (but as I understand it the wax of the giant figure of a man bent in the quintessential 21st-century pose of someone absorbed by his smartphone will be recovered and reused) the criticism of an artwork for being only temporary, passing, evanescent is odd and daft.

All performances of fine music are by their very nature evanescent. A typical Canberra Symphony Orchestra performance may only entertain its audience for two-and-a-half hours (and may for example contain a Beethoven symphony that only lasts for 42 exhilarating minutes). At the Sydney Opera House Mozart’s The Magic Flute may, from the moment its figurative wick is lit (with the opening bars of its overture) to the moment its last melody melts away, be over and done in two-and-three-quarter hours. Meanwhile lit-up, waxen Francesco 2017 is going to endure and charm onlookers for six whole months!

Whatever artist Urs Fischer is trying to achieve with his waxen giants (as usual the ANG’s own published descriptions of Fischer’s work are too pretentious and masturbatory to be of any help) I am rather moved by the notion of a sculpted human figure that, like a flesh and blood human figure, over time melts (decaying, wizening and withering) and then goes the way of all flesh, of all wax.

Michelangelo’s marble David, his biceps, buttocks and scrotum remaining eternally boyishly taut and terrific, is unconvincing and never feels like one’s true brother. He is like a member of another species, Homo everlastingus, whereas perishable, waxen Francesco is endearingly one of us. It seems to me he, like you and me, is living his life like a candle in the wind.

Mention of contemporary sculpture moves me to ask: When will we have our city adorned by a sculpture of the greatest living Canberran, Nick Kyrgios?

We are very fond of calling him "Canberra’s Nick Kyrgios" as if he’s quintessentially ours. Sports journos like to call him a "Canberra product" suggesting he is somehow made from unique and extra-special Canberra soil, water and society.

There are precedents for sculptures of living Canberran sports idols in for example the splendid statues of Laurie Daley and of Mal Meninga at the Canberra Stadium.

I have no strong feelings about where the giant public artwork of Nick should be erected. The Reid Tennis Club, this columnist’s spiritual home, would have a good claim, for Nick is sure to have played there as a junior. But the Reid Residents’ Association, like all residents associations phobically afraid of change, would surely fight having a major tourist attraction alter their leafy suburb’s deathly-quiet ambience, in which one can hear a butterfly sneeze.

But wherever the statue goes we must insist that the sculptor capture the true Nick, the special Canberran in all his fiery and controversial realism.

I see him in a pose in which he is angrily smashing a racquet, his bronze or marble lips (for it will not do to make him of wax now that our Summers have become so hot) pursed in the pronunciation of one of the f-bomb audible obscenities that have been a hallmark of his inimitable career.