City May See Wyland’s Whale Is Not the Only Fish in the Sea

Like flint and steel, the words “public” and “art” are a combination guaranteed to make sparks fly.

Toss together free-spirited artists, process-obsessed bureaucrats, piles of tax money and a total cacophony of contradictory tastes and you’ll get controversy every time.

So why do we bother? Why do we spend public money on art at all?

Because it is important.

Art adds spice to the simmering stew of our cities. At its best, a well-conceived and well-executed work of art can turn a routine public space into a destination we want to visit again and again. It can lift our spirits each time we pass and suggest to our children that the human brain is good for more than merely getting us through the day.

Even at a time when budgets are tight and bread-and-butter needs are many, it is right to keep the soul as well as the mind and body on the public agenda.

But at its worst, public art is forgettable, uninspiring, divisive--a waste of money all the more irritating for being in our face every day.

The challenge is to select the right artworks by the right artists in the right locations.

The city of Ventura has an opportunity right now to vastly improve the way it commissions public artworks. The out-of-the-blue proposal for a Wyland whale mural has brought the process something it sorely needs: wider public involvement.

Ventura recognized the importance of public art in 1991, when it passed an ordinance reserving 2% of the budget for each future construction project to be spent on art. Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Ojai are other Ventura County cities with similar programs.

By last year, about $800,000 had accumulated and the City Council appointed a seven-member Art in Public Places Advisory Committee to start spending it.

To their credit, the committee members take their responsibilities quite seriously. After a year of screening and selecting and refining, they recently unveiled their chosen concepts for artwork at two sites. The plan for the new downtown parking garage--stylized sculptures of a Chumash canoe and paddles that would use solar lights to cast shadow patterns--has the potential to delight many (while no doubt baffling many others). Less compelling is the parade of rusty oil-drill bits it envisions as mile markers along the Ventura River Trail.

If those results seem a bit arcane, that may be because the committee hears mostly from artists. The rest of the populace hasn’t taken much interest in the issue, until now.

The Wyland mural proposal could change that in a healthy way.

For two years, Bill Clawson, executive director of the city’s Visitors & Convention Bureau, has been campaigning to have world-renowned muralist Wyland paint a 550-foot-long marine scene on the California Street freeway off-ramp wall. He would like the city to pay half of the artist’s $250,000 fee from its art fund.

In Clawson’s business, marketing, you get an idea and you do it. But the city’s art committee is concerned that the speeding train of the Wyland proposal could flatten the fledgling process by which future projects will be commissioned.

And the very idea of all that money going to an out-of-town millionaire whose whale murals already adorn walls in several other Southern California cities sent a jolt through the local art community.

Last week, a public hearing overflowed the committee’s meeting room. A string of local artists, including at least three with ocean-theme murals to their credit, argued for opening the competition to all comers.

We support that approach.

Though we urge Clawson to press on with his vision for turning the California Street off-ramp into a centerpiece for Ventura’s revitalized downtown, nothing would make us happier than to see one or more local artists come forward with an even more spectacular proposal for a comparable or lower price.

The committee should call for proposals, set a deadline of no more than eight weeks from now and do all it can to drum up the very best ideas it can muster. Then, it should assemble a selection panel willing to give Wyland fair consideration--no more, no less.

And citizens who want a voice in this and future public art decisions should remember that the time to speak out is before the paint goes on.