Commission Impossible

Looks like the Oh Brother, Where ART Thou? Chain Gang.

Nicely put. Chico has never been an Art town it is a college town. I have been all over the country and the only people I have talked to that even heard about Chico mentioned only one thing, Chico State partying.

Jim,

During a recent City Council meeting the Art Director and Art Commission Chair presented their work plan to the Council. In it they were going to study art programs in places like Santa Barbara. Councilor Flynn made a point of suggesting they study smaller towns with smaller art budgets.

I think it's fair to say that Chico is more of an art town than Yuba City, but isn't likely to reach the Santa Barbara / Santa Fe levels because the economics don't match up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sierra Nevada spends more money advertising its Big Room than our city does on art. Or that Enloe spends more advertising than our city does on art.

I think successful economic development piggy-backs public funds on successful private ventures. It doesn't try to bootstrap an identity. But I could be wrong. I'm just a lowly business guy.

Lon

Art really is about preference. One person may look the hands the city commissioned and see apiece of art. Others may look at and see a waste of money. Art is based on the perceptions of the viewer. In my own personal opinion I think Chico could do more to help business owners, however a large portion our population here could not afford art, nor do they particularly care about it. Don't think that I am anti-art. I can appreciate art. I just think that art should be solely privately financed. Being that art is such a subjective thing I do not see a true viable reason for the city to invest money into it. I could be wrong too, I am just a lowly stay at home dad.

Some say public art has always been political. Kings and Churches commissioning grand works as propaganda to glorify themselves to the masses or to demonstrate grand rewards to their political support. Others say it has typically served as a convenient and controversial sideshow to divert the masses outrage away from the real shenanigans of the State.

Arts tourism is a great green and trendy bandwagon to get on. It's based on the successful models of communities that made it work the hard way. It has a lot of appeal to economic development marketeers, but we can't just go out and buy it. We have to build it first.

The cost of living here has increased for everyone. There is a lot of talent in Chico but there is little support for the artists that try to make a living with it. Everyone loves the art, but few want to buy it. Very little trickles down from the arts organizations to financially benefit their members. The artists that can afford to live here either need to sell outside this area, get a real job or be married to someone that already has one.

Chico is a small market surrounded by smaller markets. I have to laugh at some of our salaries because they emulate towns that are in much more urbanized markets with much greater tax base (like San Rafael).

I could never make a living here as an electronic engineer. I have to go outside of Chico for clients. New businesses that cater to local customers often find that the market here is too small to keep them going.

I suspect that's what's happening at the Beat. They are a niche weekly paper, and therefore have a subgroup of advertisers in an already small market. In all likelyhood they'll soon be "moving to the Internet".

The good thing for local people is that the Internet allows you to access and sell to people everywhere, if you can get through the noise.

Lon

My Mac's hooked up to a Bryston amp connected to JBL Summits.

There's no 80's wanna be heavy metal or modern digital special effects that can compare with the classic badassedness of the old Black Sabbath Iron Man.

It seems to me there is a lot that has been left off the chart above. Where did you get this info?

You ask, "So how does our public art system support and grow private funding of art?"

There is a little known of "Public Art Fund Matching Program" that I proposed and got approved several years ago. It allows private sponsors to initiate their own projects, hire the artists of their choice and haggle out a cost which is then brought to the City to have the sponsors half matched. It automatically keeps the expense of the entire project within real world free enterprise levels, and the City then only pays half of that. It also automatically builds in accountability from the sponsors who pay the first half and have to answer for the final project.

This program was unanimously approved by the Art Commissioners and Council back in 2000 and has since provided a few great examples of low cost projects. Unfortunately, the Art Staff didn't care for it and it was never included as a program or opportunity in our old policy. Many new commissioners often never know it exists.

Since I've been working with the revisions of the Public Art Policies and Procedures, it has been an effort to save the existence of Fund Matching Program and get it included in the document. I hope there's support from the Council to shift more of the available public art funds in this direction.

Gregg,

Where did I get it? That's a good question, I usually link the source, but since I didn't on this one I'm having a hard time locating it.

However, here is an RDA document showing the roughly $701,000 was spent on public art between 1988 and 2006. This is money from the RDA specifically for public art (page 6 chart).

http://www.chico.ca.us/Finance/Budget_Documents/RDA_Appendix_A.pdf

I'll take another look later to see if I can pull up the source of the information posted above. It's from some budget document I was reading, and there are a lot of them.

RDA capital projects are funded via the other 79% (20% low income housing, public 1% art) of RDA funds. Those projects may have an art component funded through RDA, but not listed specifically as public art. Untangling those expenses is a job for the Finance and Art Departments.

If the matching of private funds for art is little known then that would be worth evaluating. Perhaps all art money should be matched? Definitely all art projects funded locally should make use of local artists.

I like public art, even the public art I don't like. I'm just not sure the Art Department / Commission are on the right track. I don't think the survey results match their world view of the work they are doing. We should be talking about why that happened.

Lon

There is another public art program that allows a percentage for public art and art consultation for capital projects which are mostly RDA funded. Some large cities with huge budgets and several qualified public art staff members follow this model. Unfortunately, we don't have either here, although I like the general idea behind it.

These projects seem to be left off the chart above. The artist selection process for this program depends solely on an Artists' Registry as described in our old Policy and Procedure Manual. I don't believe any Council Members or Art Commissioners have ever heard of or seen this registry or know which artists are in it. I remember trying to apply to be included in it several years ago and never really heard much about it afterwards until I saw that most of my projects on the City Art Portfolio claimed that I was selected from it. I asked to get this info corrected since I knew this was not the case and I was nowhere to be found in it. First I was told that I was mistaken about the history of my own projects and an incomplete copy of my old application reappeared back into it. Then almost all reference to the Artist Registry was removed from the City's Art Portfolio website and the registry itself became discontinued and archived as only a historical record.

Several hundred thousand dollars of RDA money has been spent on public art through this process. The Downtown Plaza art and Chess Area is one recent example. It has been difficult to get much clear information about it and the responses to my information requests have been... well... let's say inconsistent.

Modern public artist registries are on line and maintained by the artists. Staff can't selectively control who is in it and when they are in it. This keeps everything transparent and up to date, automatically. We need to do this too.