City of the Arts?

According to City Newspaper, Joel Seligman, U of R President, Eastman School Dean Douglas Lowry and RPO director Christopher Seaman in a lovefest after receiving a substantial pot of money from Kodak to expand Eastman Theater, proclaimed Rochester “the city of the arts.”

YIPPEE!!!

I hate to sound so cynical but exactly which arts are we talking about here? Obviously, the Jazz Festival has found an audience and continues to gain support and three cheers for the founders of the Rochester Film Festival. My heart leaps whenever I see evidence of film students using our city and resources as background for their creativity. When students invest learning here, a part of them nearly always stays with us.

In no way am I belittling these achievements. In fact, with the world class music school smack in our downtown, we should have music coming off the rooftops and out of the very pores of the sidewalks and everyone in the city should weave this talent into daily events. I’m glad to see a classical music reporter contributing to the Democrat & Chronicle and a chunk of space for contemporary music set aside weekly in City.

As for film, Rochester has long been a “movie city” and maybe somebody else can explain why. My own theory is that we (universal “we”) use movies as escapist entertainment and maybe we here need more mindless diversion than the rest of the country. Winters are long. Mercury Opera has been a big disappointment. Friends no longer care about “gracious entertaining.” Museums (unless you’re under age ten) seem to be stuck in the past. What else is there to do on most Friday nights?

But - here it comes! - how about the visual arts? Where are we in this brave new world? We are a tattered lot, that’s what, so scared now of making any sound that we mostly hide in the suburban shadows. Oh, we tried fighting – more than once! We railed when funds were cut for airport art and we fought to keep Visual Studies alive and Eastman Museum from moving its collection out-of-town. Those were the glory days. Even then, getting the “art community” to form a collective voice was hard. Now it seems nearly impossible to elicit more than a nod of concern, a tut-tut-tut of sadness. I blame most of this on the absence of strong leadership.

Enter my personal ax to grind. The Monroe County Arts Council (what do they call themselves now?) has always been a bit (how shall we say?) anemic. I suppose because it’s always relied on the kindness of politicians for operating money, it’s never really taken on a big voice. (Judy Kaplan, director during the late 1980s, tried from time to time. She didn’t have the experience or the political moxie to pull anything off.) Her successor was worse. And the present director seems much more interested in seducing business money backing for the Council than driving an epee to the heart of art action.

For full disclosure, it is because of the current Arts Council that I no longer write art criticism for the Democrat & Chronicle. I slapped the wrist of the council for kowtowing to a commercial supporter. The director complained to the newspaper editor and I lost. (Talk about no political savvy!)

So, in a “city of the arts” we have very little support for the visual side of the equation, hardly any coverage from our major paper or other media and no strong visionary who asks that we soar to anything above eye level.

The glory days are over for us. The “city of the arts” has come about thirty years too late for us visual people.

Clocks, the Ticking Controversy

Wendell Castle railed (D&C, Apr. 23, 2008) about Midtown Plaza’s “Clock of Nations” occupying center stage at the Monroe County Airport during the next few years before it presumably finds a permanent home at the Gallisano Children’s Hospital at Strong. In his tirade, Castle calls the hometown artifact “kitschy junk,” unfortunate choices of words but understandable from Mr. Castle’s point of view. His own clock, after all, the very one that won a stiff art competition to occupy that space and for which the airlines and taxpayers paid $150,000, has been crated up and put into storage. Nobody seems exactly sure how long his piece will remain in its closet or why one large clock (his) is at risk during airport reconstruction but another (Midtown’s) can fit in so amicably.

Let me weigh in on the Clock of Nations. There are a few objects that define an era and the CofN is as 1960’s as Mary Quant black eyeliner, white go-go boots, and shag carpeting. It has it all – the same rounded edges that echoes the “house of the future,” the skinny stem of a Saariean table, the pure white of an egg chair. Regardless of whatever other sentimental images Rochestarians carry around in their heads, the CofN encapsulates a time and place in history.

Having established that the CofN has some value, the questions facing the community are what is to become of this iconic piece and who gets to decide? They are the very same questions that should be foremost in discussion surrounding Wendell’s clock for the very same reasons. First, these are pieces of sculpture that we tax payers actually bought and therefore, own. We don’t know their present worth. We don’t know their condition. If there is an orderly way for these decisions to be made (i.e. a Public Art Director or Public Art Commission), we don’t know about it. How is that committee formed and who serves?

The glaring fact is that the airport manager cannot make an arbitrary decision about placing art and displacing art that was purchased and placed by a duly appointed public committee formed for that purpose any more than the City can decide to give the Clock of Nations to a private hospital (even though ultimately, that may be the best place for it.)

Artwork needs moving sometimes. But our decision making process is seriously flawed and should not be left, helter skelter, to anybody who happens to come to work that day.

Shirley Dawson
6 Saddle Ridge Trail, Fairport, NY 14450
425--1639