DEEP in Kielder forest an American sculptor has erected what looks a bit like an old limekiln.Anyone who enters can see only the sky - just as they would if they ever found themselves in an old limekiln. Not consciously intended to resemble a limekiln, or anything else so far as I know, this structure has cost £300,000, including a £65,000 Euro grant given to improve the Northumberland uplands.

But the Kielder Skyscape, as the innovation is known, is but one of countless works of art that seek to improve on nature. Andy Goldsworthy's Cumbrian sheepfolds, which are not really sheepfolds, spring to mind. Like all traditional buildings, which seem to grow out of their landscape, a functional sheepfold has a beauty and harmony that can't be bettered.

So with Kielder's Skyscape. The sky itself is already beautiful. The structure and form of trees is beautiful. The very shape and sometimes sound of the land - swelling downs, crags, rustling marshes - is often beautiful. This is the living, often moving, sculpture all around us.

If not always beautiful, rivers are endlessly fascinating. But Sunderland City Council saw fit recently to commission a £250,000 floating sculpture, a contrivance of fluorescent steel cylinders, named Ambit but meant to symbolise a boat - though it lacks any of the grace possessed by the humblest boat.

Initially failing to light up, Ambit is rusting after just five months - an abysmal failure, completely unloved.

The city council's response is to take the sad contraption on an "international tour". As Arts officer Piers Masterton puts it: "We feel that by going on tour we can build the profile of it (Ambit) and hopefully when it comes back it will have the impact we intended at the outset."

It's a safe bet that Piers is not Sunderland-born, or from the North-East. If he were he would know there is no chance that the down-to-earth Wearsiders will suddenly see Ambit's invisible clothes.

It is time that time was called on this so-called "installation art", of which Ambit and Skyscape are examples, very little of which catches the public's imagination. Of course there's a towering North-East exception - Gateshead's Angel. Its success is a fluke - a bit like those typing monkeys that will eventually bang out Hamlet.

Today Barbara Castle will address the Labour Party conference. Delegates will cheer her to the rafters - and then fail to back her noble cause, the restoration of the earnings-linked state pension.

A tragedy in the national debate on the pension is that it is presented entirely in relation to today's pensioners. But the greatest imperative for restoring the earnings link is to secure a decent income for pensioners of the future. It is people under 40 who stand to lose most. They should be shoulder to shoulder with current pensioners on this issue. We should not allow the Government to get away with this.

Mo bows out...ah, but when? Interviewed after she announced her decision to quit at the next General Election, she let slip the phrase "when I go next May". That was before the fuel crisis, the pensions crisis, Gordon Brown's embarrassment over a big party donation, and the latest whopping handout to the Dome. What odds on Mo taking another farewell?

A little detail from the conference deserves to cost Labour another half point or so in the opinion polls. Largely banished from recent conferences, Labour's traditional red has made a big comeback in the conference hall this year. But not behind the speakers, whose televised backdrop is rose pink. Thus Tony Blair hopes to appease traditional Labour stalwarts at the conference without reminding viewers of Old Labour. Pathetic really. But it mirrors the shallowness of the entire New Labour shebang.