The council has just voted -- ‘The resolution would set aside 1 percent of any building project of more than $10 million to pay for public art to accompany that project. Also, 1 percent of any borrowing for other projects under $10 million would go into a separate pool of money for public art projects.’ Sounds swell on paper, a way to humanize the visual anonymity of glass-curtain exteriors, the brutal efficiency of pavement and traffic management, but what sort of art will it be?
Some weekday afternoon a group of people with the civic weight to make big decisions but the free time to drink coffee around a conference table are going to be given a big pot of money to buy art with. On the table will be a pile of proposals, somehow within shouting distance of their previously published budget, imagine that. The piece that looks most impressive, most provocative, without actually saying anything that could offend anyone, will come out on top, mission accomplished. The people involved aren’t self-appointed curators of community sensibilities, oh no, they’re not to blame. The same responsibility on anyone else's shoulders would most likely come out the same. It’s the backwards process -- collecting public money to reach a certain amount, searching out a likely location, and then issuing a call for proposals for future art to be constructed for this one particular spot. The long-term result will be cities festooned with outdoor monopoly tokens, site-specific curiosities, welded, molded, bent, and painted. They’ve created a whole new industry.
This new entity in the art market engenders its own form of art, and breeds its own brand of 3-D creatives willing to weld, pound, and pour to express the progressive civic pride of just about anywhere. It’s a constant competition, cranial popping proposals shipped in all directions, all in the hope of catching the eye of some flyover burg with public loot to spend on art. Is it a step in the right direction? Probably. Public money spent to start the conversation, to engage the critical mechanism in the minds of common citizens, will pay back immensely when individuals begin to internalize the vocabulary of visual thought, and want to see, compare, and live with art of their own.
