Earlier this year, Seattle had a mini media furor over the possibility of one artwork by a serial killer being shown at Seattle Art Museum. Last week, New York ended a run of a show featuring nothing but serial killer art, and hardly anyone noticed. Victimizing Visions showed at Webster Hall, which is a dance club, not a publicly funded museum, which probably accounts for that show's reasonably low profile (until Salon mentioned the show last week). All of this has whetted my appetite for a kind of art I hadn't had much interest in before. In general, I don't care much about art that's notable more for its creator than for its intrinsic qualities; now I have visions of John Wayne Gacy's clown paintings dancing around in my head. Who will sate my hunger?
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If you want to know why Broadway has become so monodimensionally commercial, take a look at the sad struggle over a vacant lot of land in the great location where Broadway meets Roy Street and 10th Avenue East (recently the subject of a fine report by Alan Snel in the P-I). Called the Keystone site, the near-trapezoidal plot of land has been a paved, fenced-off lot for most of this decade, while various groups have tried to figure out what to do with it. The best idea by far is a proposed private/public partnership between L&N Properties and the city to create a mixed-use building that will house the new Capitol Hill branch library, some commercial tenants, 70 apartments above, and parking for shoppers and residents below. Unfortunately, to contain all of this, the building would have to be 65 feet tall -- 25 feet higher than the local zoning allows. Opposition to the plan has centered primarily on the discrepancy over height, but commercial property owners are generally hostile to libraries in business districts -- as supporters of siting the new downtown library near all the new development on Pine Street recently found out. Unless L&N finds a way to make their numbers work on a 40-foot building, we're likely to find the new library on one of two marginal sites: the current one (behind Broadway Market), or just on the other side of Broadway at the Lowell School. The Keystone site will then feature -- shops, just what Broadway needs more of.
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I want to cover the various visions being promoted for city arts funding; I want to become interested in the difference between devoting 1% of city construction projects to art (the current level), 1.5% (as the mayor's task force and the mayor recommend), and 2.5% (as Allied Arts wants). But let's just say it all feels very... abstract to me right now. The only thing that's really piqued my interest in Mayor Schell's public response to his task force's report was his taking the opportunity to fire the head of the Seattle Arts Commission, Wendy Ceccherelli -- oh, excuse me, to find her a job administrating arts uses at Sand Point. Given the SAC's complete lack of status as a player in the local arts -- not only do they have little funding, they've done little to advocate for, assist, or advise local artists and arts groups -- some shakeup is certainly welcome. An energetic SAC could be a real asset to the community.
