It is 2003 and a group of art vigilantes armed with blowtorches, angle grinders and bolt cutters gives the City of Sydney an ultimatum: you have three months to dismantle Ken Unsworth's sculpture, Stones against the Sky, or we'll destroy it.

Unfortunately, the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places never makes good on its threat. And so Unsworth's universally hated work (known as ''poo on sticks'') still sits at the top of William Street, frightening the children.

Popularity contest ... Sydney’s public art includes Aspire at Ultimo.

It is not the first time Sydney's sometimes dire public art has attracted the vitriol of self-styled critics. In 1964, the cover image of the satirical magazine OZ featured its editor, Richard Neville, and two accomplices using Tom Bass's copper P&O wall fountain in Hunter Street as a urinal.

Since it was erected in Redfern in 2007, Bower, a sculpture by Susan Milne and Greg Stonehouse, has had locals seething. ''People graffiti it and throw paint over it all the time,'' says James Draper, of Boutwell Draper Gallery. ''Nobody here likes it. It's hard-edged and aggressive and visually cold and ugly. People walk into the thing and hurt themselves. And at night you never know who's hiding behind it.''