The City Council last October made some changes to the process for seeking submissions for the city’s sculpture gardens, reducing the number of artists used from six to three, increasing their stipend from $3,000 to $6,000 and the length of the artwork’s loan from one to two years. The intention behind the changes was to increase the quality of submissions.
The plan worked in terms of quantity. The city’s Cultural Arts Commission received 60 submissions, compared to the ten to 20 submissions typically received in years past. But last week, the City Council rejected the three works chosen by the commission, largely on the grounds that their quality was insufficient.
The three pieces, titled “Beach Bubbles”, “Balls”, and “How’s Traffic Today”, were intended for placement, respectively, at the Manhattan Beach Arts Center, the Civic Center, and Metlox Plaza. None were embraced by council.
Mayor Steve Napolitano was particularly pointed in his art criticism. One, he said, was a catchy title attached to a “disconnected piece,” another was “more a piece of technology than a piece of art” while the third was a child’s plaything knockoff.
“This is a kid’s toy, which I’ve seen before,” Napolitano said of one of the pieces. “You can manipulate them, move them around. It’s great, but there’s not a lot of thought here — another rainbow-shaped thing. It’s not very original, it’s not thought-provoking. It’s just nice, but, you know if we’re going to spend $12,000 on some art, let’s get some art. This is just too obvious to me.”
“I went through the 60 proposals,” he added. “I saw some more intriguing pieces…So I would frankly send this back to the drawing board.”
Mayor pro tem Nancy Hersman was likewise unenthusiastic about the art but expressed reluctance in rejecting the commission’s choices.
“Art is so subjective — what you like, what I like, there’s just going to be differences,” she said. “And I hesitate…Our cultural arts commissioners looked at these 60 pieces, and there are pieces that resonated with them, so I hate to say, ‘Oh well, I don’t like them, so they should go.’ It just feels a little bit wrong.”
Councilperson Amy Howorth said she was excited about some of the city’s other public art projects underway — the city earmarks 1 percent of all development fees for art, and has $300,000 currently allocated for sculptures, murals, and utility box art, with another $1.1 million still in the art fund — but confessed the current submissions left her cold.
“I think we can do better,” Howorth said. “That feels very harsh…I’m really excited about the stuff we’re looking for on the utility boxes and some of that work, but this didn’t grab me.”
“I would like to see some more ambitious pieces for our community,” said Councilperson David Lesser. “Our community is sophisticated, it is interested in the arts and deserves a higher caliber of art…I don’t mean any disrespect to the artists who produced these pieces and had vision. They’re nice. I’d like to figure out a way we can get some more work that represents our community, particularly if we’re going to talk about a two-year loan at the price point of the existing sculptures.”
The council finally all agreed to direct the Cultural Arts Commission to make three different selections. Hersman suggested they give the commission parameters to select by.
“Pick better ones,” Napolitano said.
