Late this summer, the provincial government of B.C. announced brutal cuts to arts funding, yanking the base out from under Vancouver's creative sector at the very moment when the world's attention was coming to town.

This put the arts and artists in an awkward position. There's no point in kicking up the old arts-versus-sports fight, which, in addition to being dull, is unwinnable from the arts side (the very idea of winning or losing being a sports condition in the first place).

But how to respond to the fact that there's money for arts during the Olympics but not after? Local artists obviously feel screwed. Meanwhile, artists brought in from out of town to do expensive temporary commissions can't help but notice that they're putting on a show that essentially covers up the fact that B.C. arts have been crippled.

How is all this playing out? Well, a central theme of the art that's being produced locally during these Games is resistance. Protest. Some of the responses are playful, some more enigmatic.

Seattle curator Eric Fredericksen's group show is playful. It's Invitation to an Infiltration (at the Contemporary Art Gallery), and artists including Dexter Sinister, Hadley+Maxwell, and Jonathan Middleton take over the space with interventions that essentially "compete" with each other, changing and responding to each other over the course of the show's run (through February 28). It's institutional critique gone wild.

Meanwhile at Artspeak is Lucy Pullen's more deadpan I Would Prefer Not To, which consists of blinds drawn on the gallery. The blinds are made of reflective fabric, so that during the day they just look silvery, like they're turning away from the Olympics going on all around them. At night they blindingly reflect light, proposing what the artist hopes is "the idea of a blind spot within the spectacle, positing Artspeak in a position of complicated refusal."

The biggest art spectacle during the Games has to be Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Vectorial Elevation, a massive light show of 20 robotic searchlights flying around in the sky. The beams are directed by input on the web, meaning that the design of the show is controlled by people around the world. (You can control it, too.)

Lozano-Hemmer is one of those artists who finds himself in an awkward position, and he decided to speak out about it in a conversation at Emily Carr. It's a rousing speech.

If Vancouver and other cities want to compete at the world level for minds, for bringing people into a vibrant way, they need to include the arts to do eccentric motherfucking things…. That’s our participation. We shit disturb. And we do that to try and find new ways of engaging with each other in our culture and in our city. And so I hope—and this is just very romantic I know—but I hope the Olympics will reactivate the dull minds that are running this province to giving money into the arts.

Here's the video.

UPDATE: Here's another artwork happening in Vancouver during the Olympics, a "bar" with roots in the Troubles (and with the name Candahar, which is beautiful on several levels).