Public Art

Yesterday the Vancouver Sun published a story on the barge that remains grounded at Sunset Beach. The story, inspired by a social media meme, concerns the barge's status as a work of public art. But rather than provide a quote from the City of Vancouver's many specialists on public art, the Sun's Kevin Griffiths instead relates the opinions of a former private art gallerist and founder/president/board member/curator of the Vancouver Biennale who, through the assistance of former city councillor and initiative arm-twister Jim Green, uses public space as a showroom for his public art commissions/selections, sometimes towards their sale, from which this founder/president/board member/curator's Biennale benefits. Does the City, as the Biennale's open-air venue-provider, receive a portion of that financial benefit? Has the Sun ever thought to ask him that? Or the City? Just what is the leasing agreement between the City and the Vancouver Biennale?

The founder/president/board member/curator of the Vancouver Biennale doesn't believe the barge is, in itself, a work of public art, though he doesn't really tell us why, or what public art is. He does, however, believe that if the barge is painted, it might qualify as such -- like the painted cement silos on Granville Island, a paint job he commissioned for a previous (2014) Biennale on a structure that one Vancouver photographer thought resonant enough as is, but the Biennale founder/president/board member/curator saw as a blank slate, a turrim nullius, something to colour, turn into dolls, infantilize, anything but celebrate what those gorgeous silos were designed for, as truth-to-materials examples of industrial design. Don't mean to get all Corbo here, only to remind those old enough of a time when newspapers had visual art critics, first, all-purpose journalists, second.