Public art’s beauty lies in the eye of the beholder | From the Roundtable

It’s time to weigh in on the matter of so called “public” art and the simmering controversy over a law that requires artistically enhancing various city projects and spending 1 percent of the total project cost to do so. Highly visible in some cases and less noticeable in others, these oeuvres have been railroaded by us, some believe, and have little merit. They are the updated equivalent of various projects that were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s as relief for impoverished artists regardless of reputation or the merit of their work.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on these commissioned works that adorn various city-funded projects ranging from controversial, in-your-face parking structures to more obscurely situated fire stations. With naming rights soon to follow as a suggested additional source of revenue, one whimsically wonders what “art” might be chosen to adorn the hypothetical — and for a laugh — “Lansing W. Leatherlips Memorial Sewage Treatment Plant” in the Perche Creek bottoms.
Positive consensus has already developed about the keyhole that stands in front of the new City Hall complex at Eighth and Broadway. Then there’s the overwhelming accumulation of negative brickbats (some might like to lob a real brick or two) over the low-six-figure amount that was fired across the pond to Europe for some fancy colored glass panels that adorn the stairwells of “Garagzilla,” the new parking garage at Sixth and Walnut.
My vision of what’s considered public art is apparently much broader than what Columbia’s art cognoscenti would like us to believe it is. Troubling is their condescension whenever we rubes deign to talk about it. Listen closely, and you’ll still hear their howls of outcry over public acceptance of that quartet of whimsical animal figures the community at large found acceptable for placement a few years ago east of the Boone County Courthouse. In reality, there’s a great deal of public art lying about, though it seems we’ve had a history of tearing down our history almost as fast as commissioned items have been raised.

My favorite examples of early public art were the black and gold images of tigers painted in 1928 on the sides of the elevator penthouse on top of the Tiger Hotel. Still visible, though weathered over the years, the hotel’s tigers passed away in 1973 when a zealous City Council passed a city ordinance to eviscerate what they considered to be offensive signage.
The ordinance forced the hotel’s owner to hire a crew to paint over and obliterate the historic images of Columbia’s favorite beast, though ghostly traces of the king of the jungle are still vaguely visible. The sins of 1973 have been long forgotten, but the permission granted in 2004 to allow the renewal and relighting of Columbia’s oldest neon sign on top of the hotel was a laudatory compensation, even though, as I recall, it was reluctantly granted.
I believe public art should be about the overall appearance of the community. Think about how all the money squandered over the past few years on a few mediocre projects of dubious merit could have been more wisely spent to enhance the city’s overall appearance. We should begin with the gateways and find better ways to welcome visitors, guide them around and leave them with positive impressions of the area.
Here’s a totally offensive suggestion: Secure billboards at the principal gateways to the city with the following message in huge letters: “Welcome to Columbia — The Home of the University of Missouri.” Of course there would be variations as the months went by saluting other institutions including our two colleges, major employers and so forth.
Let’s dare the sign-adverse City Council to go electronic! The Council stealthily adopted the ban on electronic signs of any sort a few years ago, but few of us probably realized how draconian their mood was at the time.
Let’s lift the ban and permit electronic message boards. Of course this is so crassly objectionable that it’s beyond the reality of acceptance, but you never know. A couple of advisory electronic message boards might do more good for Columbia than all the inanimate pieces of public art have done for us so far.