I am no art or architecture expert. So if you are not audacious enough to read an article about art by a non-expert move on to better stuff than mine. I never really understood art or what constitutes art. And to be perfectly frank I couldn’t care less.

I love some stuff, love some stuff less and, sometimes, even if experts tell me stuff is great, I grimace and move on. Or, at least, I try doing this because expert advice in all sorts of in-your-face or even subtle situations surely help you to find – or hinder you from finding – your own voice or opinion about art, artefacts and architecture.

Even critics have got some things terribly wrong or at least time proved the previous experts of the day wrong. If critics and the art establishment had it their way the Impressionists – those who are so much our darlings now and fetch mega millions of euros on the market – would have ended up as just a few other forgotten artists.

Closer to home, we have the Piano project. Derided and nearly destroyed by many, I and a few others believe this project is a great piece of audacity, a new twist to our beloved capital city, a true architectural statement. And not being the most universally acclaimed of projects is another plus point for it.

Art needs something more than a sculpture of our heroes to make us truly heroic

If anyone, including most architects, had to design something for a city steeped in history and grandeur, chances are that they would stray on the side of the known, the expected, the traditional. He – or she – who dares is the one who breaks the mould and moves not just into the present but into the future.

This is what the Piano project does; it goes way beyond the past and way into the future with its audacity and if we discuss it till a new generation arises to appreciate it better, then even that is a good sign.

Discussion is what makes art live. If, as some traditionalists clamoured for, we had rebuilt the old opera house and the gate as they were originally we would merely have produced another pastiche.

One of Milan’s squares boasts the personification of audacity. A carving of a hand with its middle finger stuck out in defiance, in rudeness, stands bang opposite the building housing the Stock Exchange. This is truly a talking point and a statement that many maybe do not love.

But the message is clear. The sculpture was erected – what an inappropriate word in the circumstances – just after the 2008 credit crunch. The city of Milan accepted this gift from a sculptor who wanted to tell the financiers what he, and many like him, thought of their goings-on and the terrible suffering they, or rather their actions, had inflicted on much of the world at large.

This is true art: art that makes us talk, art that moves us and makes us sometimes smile and often angry.

In Malta, we fear anything which breaches the norm, which is in your face and debatably fitting. While Milan kept and loved its rude finger, we had a horse – the żieme – which disappeared and which was a great piece of debatable and audacious art. It challenged all our ideas of ideal beauty, of all that is perfect or representational. We moved it to god knows where.

It seems it wasn’t planned to stay on permanently by the city’s grand new entrance. So it was not taken off as part of a conspiracy but can’t we now be audacious and find it a permanent place somewhere else in Valletta?

We now have a horrid idea shoved on to us, to have the monti, its silly wares and the even sillier hawkers given a place just inside the city and smack in front of the new Parliament building. This is hardly audacity; it is idiocy. And if both major political parties – those scourges of our land – have promised that site to the hawkers, let them now wake up and stop the rot. That would be supremely audacious and worthy of acclaim.

Another few steps further into Valletta, another silly sight assaults us. Without meaning any disrespect to Guido de Marco, his lifelike monument standing outside the law courts is utterly unaudacious. It is terribly old-fashioned and stuck in a world, and artistic idiom, way beyond its sell-by date.

If only we could move on and embrace the new idea that art needs something more than a sculpture of our heroes to make us truly heroic. Let our audacity carry us into the realms of the 21st century.