What bugs me in the VAG’s announcement is the arrogance with which they put forth their decision. Is it really their decision to make?

The VAG is a public agency, their chosen site is a publicly owned site. Well, wouldn’t the public have something to say about where the VAG goes, or what happens to the site(s)? Wouldn’t we also want to comment on the size of the ambition?

More importantly, let’s also have a public competition that makes more sense out of the dog’s breakfast that is Robson Square. Yes, with a zipline that space can draw a crowd, but as a part of an everyday city it is completely disfunctional.

The VAG Board seems supremely unqualified to make decisions about the public good manifested in the VAG, Robson Square, the downtown and Larwill Park.

What do we value? As alluded to earlier, roads & cars get top billing. I’ll bet a loonie that the entire operating cost and a phased program of purchases at a new VAG building would be completely covered if even 1% of the annual road and car subsidy in Metro Vancouver was diverted to this cause.

Priorities.

MB = Media Baron …. no, that’s not it.

I don’t pretend to have a PhD in art, and I certainly am critical of certain exhibits, both past and present, which to me is indicative of curator’s and management’s diverse tastes in usually a very confined budget. But I will never say that VAG shouldn’t be given a chance to improve their collections, and manage them from the persective of both a GALLERY and a MUSEUM (there’s a difference — museums are a lot larger). This requires more space and resources.

If, as part of a public funding package, the impetus will be to focus a higher percentage of effort, funding and space to local and regional art, then so be it. But, as GMGW eloquently expounded, the international exhibits of Dutch Masters and others have real value not only monetarily (higher admissions, which helps with upkeep), but in increasing the public appreciation of art. There were hordes of school kids actually looking hard at the early Rembrants and the Vermeer when I was there, and they were actively engaged in a discussion with a teacher on life during the 1600s in Amsterdam. Try to assign a monetary value to that.

I believe there is great potential for 21st Century aboriginal art. Jungen was mentioned, and he is an excellent example. But people like Thomas Cannell are upcoming … wait for his Stone Family to appear at the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby soon.

People have alluded to Gehry’s titanium roof structures. It IS a versatile medium that will outlast many other materials, so I think writing it off is premature, especially if it is used in new ways on a new art museum. However, I would like to see new innovations unique only to the West Coast, like imagery from aboriginal art used on / in the building. ‘Raven Steals The Sun’ rendered in a large sheet stainless steel frieze on a new building entry facade would be very powerful indeed, and would make the building a canvas to support the art, not the other way around. You can’t get any more regionally grounded than that. Provided scale, proportion, interior + outdoor space programming, materials palette and public open space amenities are addressed with due care and attention, then I’ll bet we’ll get something to be proud of and that will help pay its own way with new income.

Where were the “elitist” and “waste of taxpayer’s money” comments when the stadium roof was proposed? Why does this attitude uncover itself only when things like art is discussed, but not with other expenditures of equal or higher weight, and with arguably less value?

I wonder if such blowhard comments were made when the Rijksmuseum or the Louvre were established? Obviously if they did, they didn’t have much effect, thank the god of your choice.

Yet these institutions now occupy the heart of Dutch and French culture, and are given status as signifiers of a nation’s identity and creative history, and stand on their own as pillars of great city building without the momentary support of things like bland condo developments. An art institution of significance will age ungracefully with such add-ons.

Moreover, the Dutch and French art collections and buildings had to start somewhere, and were obviously given priority by public officials and private donors over the centuries. And they attract millions of people every year, which helps justify a marketing campaign that really does result in paying for the upkeep of the collection.

Now we have a stadium roof to look forward to, no questions asked, rubber stamped. How sad is that?

Don’t be too harsh on Luke. He brought to the gallery on Georgia one of the best shows I have seen at VAG: Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella etc.

That must have been 1980+/-

As a trustee I received a signed print of the RR’s original Cloister Series, still, I hope, in the permanent collection: I enjoy my copy to this day.

VAG’s current director is reported as . . . errrr . . . “good at marketing”.

Ummmmm, it is so distressing to see how PR and marketing has become such a prevalent emphasis in administrations across the board.

Evidently, as Frances reports elsewhere, the mayor has acquired yet a fourth member of his entourage, who’s background is public relations.

If the mayor’s office is doing its job, that alone would be self evident without the bullshit! As for a need to add Tagalog when can language-sensitivity end . . especially in Vancouver’s magnificently diverse ethnicity . . .

So, indeed, one has to wonder . . .

PR has acquired a reputation for perfidy for one glaring reason: it is perfidious.

A well run administration should stand out on its own merits.

I would rest easier knowing the gallery director can recognise authenticity in a work of art . . .

First: How many people who are reading this, do you suppose, apart from a few geezers like you and me and a few others, can actually remember first-hand the previous VAG, which sat three blocks west on Georgia until 1983? Sometimes the establishment of context just has to take precedence.

Second: Just because I acknowledge K. Bartel’s marketing skills does not necessarily mean that I admire everything she does with them. Far from it. But there’s no denying that she is the most politically skilled administrator the VAG has had in many a day– unless you long for the days of the terminally disdainful Willard Holmes, perpetually glowering over his bowtie in elitist detachment?

Third: “What will happen to the Rattenbury?” you plaintively ask. The simple answer is: Ultimately, whatever the cabal of mega-developers who really run this town (and who have long acted as puppeteers to civic planners, Council members, and Mayors alike) wish to see happen to it. There is not a single “heritage” structure in Vancouver that is completely safe from the right combination of huge offers of money and political pressure (the same kind, for instance, that is increasingly being brought to bear to persuade City Hall to facilitate massive densification of the 70s-scale South Shore of False Creek). If the cost of a new VAG is the demolition of the Rattenbury, than it will happen, whether it’s done at the pleasure of Ned Bosa, Peter Wall, or any of the others. Certainly, I would prefer to see both a new, architecturally distinctive VAG– (at Larwill Park, if it can be made to work, although I would prefer to see that block’s long-forgotten, pre-Bus Depot designation as public space returned– diehard idealist that I am) *and* the retention of the Rattenbury courthouse, whether as a VAG facility or for some other purpose (perhaps the Belkin Gallery could be moved downtown from its currently isolated UBC location, and its operation expanded). I just don’t see any way of persuading any of the powers that be in this city, business, financial, or political, that it would be viable– or even desirable– to achieve both aims. And that saddens me more than you are evidently capable of understanding.

Lastly: As for your concerns about the authenticity of the Vermeer “Love Letter” canvas, you may rest assured that its history and authenticity have been well documented by the Rijksmuseum, the world’s greatest repository of seventeenth-century Dutch art (a claim I can attest to firsthand), and while the painting in question is undoubtedly a “lesser” Vermeer (which is one reason why we got it), the presence in this classic-art-deprived city of any work from the greatest Old Masters, especially Vermeer, whose surviving works number only 30 and none of whose work has been exhibited in this country for half a century, is cause for some celebration. I would hope that on that point, at least, we can agree.
gmgw

And don’t be too sure gmgw . . . you may be looking at a fake . . . the international art world is swimming in fakes . . blame it on your marketers . . .