What a collection. Everything from an enormous tattered Tricolour seemingly shot through by machinegun-fire to a "Love Elevator" featuring the romantic musings of Irish poets, plus lots of objects in the shape of obelisks, sails, rockets, spires or spirals featured in Dublin Corporation's millennium monument competition.
Given that the contest was open to everyone and attracted entries from ordinary people as well as qualified designers and sculptors, from Ireland and abroad, it should not be at all surprising that the standard is varied.
But then, there has never been anything quite like it, certainly not in the Republic.
Some ideas are wacky, others are weird and a few are wonderful - including some that did not make the shortlist.
What the public exhibition at the Civic Offices which opened last night shows is that designing a monument in the city is fraught with difficulty and there are no easy answers.
Many entries are inevitably coarse; indeed, some competitors removed their panels after discovering there would be an exhibition catalogue linking all of the numbered entries - judged anonymously last November by a panel of assessors - with the names of those who submitted them.
Interestingly, only one of the 200-odd entries on show has an overtly nationalist theme.
It's a "Liberty Fountain" with a wall fronted by the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation, all lined up waiting to be shot - the wounded James Connolly sitting in a chair.
But there are several outsized harps, one with tubular steel strings.
The sea-change in the culture of Irish nationalism is mirrored by the equivalent paucity of monuments with a religious theme, with some entries proposing giant Celtic crosses.
Pagan imagery is more popular, exemplified by several columns with a phoenix on top being born again in the legendary flames.
There are numerous rocket-like monuments, mostly with public access, and other self-consciously "high-tech" symbols of the age.
But most seem curiously dated in that they would have been truly "futuristic" only in the 1930s.
One or two are egg-like in shape, as if they had been laid by ET's galactic mother.
The exhibition is also peppered with bulky structures that resemble medieval siege towers, huge cones and geodesic domes or flying saucers mounted on thick poles or columns.
Another entry attempts to evoke a portal dolmen while some competitors opted for elliptical bridges that would cross the breadth of O'Connell Street.
There's also a bell-tower (in the shape of a bell), a huge slab inscribed in Ogham, a hurdy-gurdy that may have escaped from Funderland, a "writer's monument" as grim as any mausoleum, something that looks like a peatfired power station and even one strangely familiar icon which resembles a giant penis with a knot in it.
A high proportion of the competitors clearly believed public access was important.
But in most cases, the need to provide a staircase and a lift for disabled people turned their entries from monuments into buildings.
One or two proposed saucer-shaped restaurants at the top, but that's all been done before.
There are also numerous abstract forms, more sculpture than architecture, though even these look somewhat dated, as well as deconstructed classical columns - one topped by a golden boat and another by what appear to be nude female figures flying around the place.
Yet another is in the form of a giant orchid.
Though some entries are clearly off-the-wall, others are elegant - including a transparent tower designed by David Browne and Brian King, of RKD architects in Dublin, and an ingenious hydraulic piece by Michael Collins and Associates which would propel people above the rooflines in an upturned spaceship module.
Much attention will focus on the runners-up: Hunt McGarry Architects, from London, with their monument to the information age, and Dublin-born Jonathan Bennett, whose proposal consists of a memorial to the absence of Nelson.
Both are represented in the exhibition by beautifully-made models of their schemes.
The adjudicators apparently had some concern that the huge pair of electronic billboards at the base of Hunt McGarry's proposal would inevitably become commercial, thereby debasing the idea.
There was also a fear that, because it is a monument of our time, it could also become dated, sooner or later.
Regarding Jonathan Bennett's scheme, the corporation's deputy chief planning officer, Mr Dick Gleeson, said that although the idea of hollowing out the core of a layered glass obelisk to reveal the profile of the Pillar was "quite hypnotic", he believed it would be "lost" on the younger generation which has no memory of Nelson Pillar.
Mr Gleeson, a member of the adjudication panel, said nothing could match the "pure abstract power" of London architect Ian Ritchie's winning entry.
But the Lord Mayor, Senator Joe Doyle, said that in a sense all competitors were winners because they had offered their ideas to the city.
The city manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, said it was "only right and proper that something like this excites passion", adding that he would have been disappointed had there been no public reaction.
"It's the most prestigious site in the Republic of Ireland, so why shouldn't there be a passionate debate about what goes up there?"
He said the £3 million cost represented only 1 per cent of the investment planned for O'Connell Street, mainly by the private sector.
He anticipated that the City Council would approve the project in March, after the current six-week public consultation period, so that it could be erected before the end of this year.