Spending and Saving on Bathurst Street

Public art does, I think, serve an important intangible purpose: it makes public spaces more compelling, both for residents and for visitors, and as a visible show of support for the arts in general, helps mark a city as progressive and culturally viable, and its people as interesting and engaged.

It also helps bring artists and their supporters into the civic decision-making process, and they are a group often left out when the left-brainers get together to plan, design, build, and endlessly blather on about public spaces.

“Public art is a distinguishing part of our public history and evolving culture. It reflects and reveals our society, adds meaning to our cities and uniqueness to our communities. Public art humanizes the built environment and invigorates public spaces. It provides an intersection between past, present and future, between disciplines, and between ideas,” according to the U.S. non-profit group Americans for the Arts.

It’s been argued that officially sponsored murals help curtail the unofficial kind — graffiti, or “tagging” if you’re quite a bit hipper than I. Public art refocuses the energy of the artists, away from something destructive and towards something aimed at the public good. Presumably, though, only if the actual artists show up to do the work, and better still, if they actually belong to the population of the city they’re supposed to be revitalizing.

A National Post article this month said that the City of Toronto’s Transportation Services paid $23,000 to Brooklyn street artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, collaborators under the name Faile, to paint a mural on Bathurst Street north of Davenport. And once again we’ve botched a good idea by wrapping it up in red tape and throwing (too much) money at it.

First off, as the Post points out, why did we have to import artists from the U.S. when we have so many fine artists right here? Lilie Zendel, head of Street Art Toronto, is quoted in the Post saying, “We hope that by inviting street artists from out of town, other cities will invite our artists too. And it gives local artists the opportunity to see the work of internationally recognized street artists.”

This seems to me to put the cart before the horse. First of all, the work of internationally recognized street artists is readily available online for anyone so inclined to look at, but also, since when does it make sense to spend $23,000 on publicly funded “hope”? We presumably hired Faile because we believed in their work, which someone presumably saw online or while on a trip to the artists’ native Brooklyn. Art is not a tit-for-tat industry. It doesn’t follow that because we hired someone from out of town, that someone out of town will hire from Toronto. Good artists get to go where the work is.

It seems good artists get to everywhere, actually.

When the Post reporter tried to visit the artists on-site at their wall-in-progress, he found another artist, this time from Oakland, painting in the Patricks’ stead. “They couldn’t make it. We do work for them,” the pinch-painter told the Post. In fact, the writer found three artists on site, and not a one named Patrick, and not one local, either. One came from Denmark, even.

It would seem a summer student at the City of Toronto measured the wall, sent the specs to Brooklyn, and was rewarded with the arrival of several artists, but none of them actually part of Faile.

The Post reports that Zendel did have an expectation that someone from Faile would actually come to Toronto to execute the work, although it would seem not to have been specified in any sort of contract.

And $23,000? I don’t advocate asking artists to work for free, precisely because so many of them will willingly do so. People with a passion are like that. But there are a dozen ways this could have been handled in which a local artist gets the experience of a lifetime, and the City saves money while getting a boffo mural.

Why didn’t we open a city-wide competition (or province- or country-wide), and let the winning artist not only paint their mural on the designated wall, but then spend $10,000 sending him or her on an around-the-world trip to see internationally recognized street artists from Berlin to Melbourne? We could have saved $13,000, made an artist or two ridiculously happy, and gotten a lot more mileage out of the story to boot.

How about spending even half that much to hire a professional artistic mentor, then invite inner-city artists to spend a week at the wall with the mentor, learning, talking about the artistic process, and getting jazzed up on the possibilities before unleashing their young talents on the wall itself?

If we’re not even going to get the original artists in attendance, we could have opened it up to a sketch competition, let city residents vote on the winning sketch, and then hired Toronto-based painters to execute the vision, once again giving locals work all while saving a big chunk of that $23,000.

We could have invited a local high school art class to come up with the design, and then just set them loose for a couple of days with a few thousand dollars’ worth of paint.

Open it up to OCAD students to do as they please. Break the wall up into manageable squares, and auction off the squares, giving half the money to local artists to fill each square with paint and the other half to charity.

Can’t we do better than hiring out-of-towners to not come here?

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Speaking of Bathurst Street, it looks like the iconic Honest Ed’s department store has been sold, but won’t go away anytime soon. Although sold under contract to a Vancouver-based developer, David Mirvish promised CP24 that the store has been rented back and will continue for “perhaps four more Christmases and at least three.” The turkeys and fruit cakes will continue, and Mirvish said he hoped people would pick up their Tootsie Rolls to hand out for Halloween.

The purchaser, Westbank Properties, is the luxury residential developer responsible for the Shangri-La hotels in Toronto and Vancouver. Mirvish confirmed that Westbank has the property under contract, with a deal to close later this year; he said the approvals process would take three or four years, during which time the store would remain.

According to the Globe, Mirvish chose Westbank over other bidders because of its quality of design.  Mirvish’s focus is now on the Mirvish Gehry development project proposed for the land under and around the Princess of Wales theatre, to be designed by architectural legend Frank Gehry, which the Honest Ed’s sale would help fund.