IS it art?
That's a question that has plagued public officials for centuries. One person's portrait is another person's pornography. What's abstract art for one is asinine to another.
What about yarnbombing? If you're not familiar with the term, the Internet has lots of pictures for you to look at. If you're too busy reading the newspaper - God bless you - then allow me to explain.
Yarnbombing involves wrapping various public objects like trees and stop signs and bike racks with knitting. Yes, knitting. There's a rather grubby and forlorn example on a Lonsdale street sign right now. It's a trifle bizarre but certainly harmless and certainly not offensive. But should tax dollars help pay for it?
Even before we get to the money issue, I do think that taking a guerilla public art project and making it into some sort of state program robs it of something. But that's just me.
You wouldn't think this issue would really get people angry, but the City of North Vancouver's council got into one of the fiercest debates I've seen in years over whether or not to cough up $7,500 of your money to fund some yarnbombing. The money would go towards needles and yarn for some seniors and high-school kids and Capilano University students, but the bulk of it would pay for a professional artist to conceive and oversee several large-scale installation projects.
Some councillors pride themselves on being tight-fisted guardians of every single cent of tax revenue, and good for them. When everyone is griping about their taxes and many public services are under review, wrapping stuff with wool definitely seems like something that can wait, or not happen at all.
But what if I said we should build a metal horse in a park and inlay its footprints in the sidewalk? How about some bent metal near the waterfront echoing our mountains? You paid for both of those pieces of public art.
It's unfortunate that this yarnbombing idea ever came before city council. In the regular scheme of things, The Arts Office gets its annual money and spends it as it sees fit. But the $7,500 cheque was earmarked to help pay for some artsy-type bench just off of Lonsdale. The deal with a nearby strata council fell through and the money came back in front of council. In retrospect, it might have been wiser to simply toss the money back into the arts budget without any particular project attached. I think most councillors would be happier without ever having to judge public art ideas. But it was presented to councillors as $7,500 for yarnbombing and, predictably, several balked.
At first, I agreed this was the height of frivolity and money badly spent. But in the days that followed, I changed my mind. I'm not going to launch into a passionate defence of public knitting. Some of the pictures I've seen look like good fun and I do see quite a lot of it in my neighbourhood. But nobody ever paid or encouraged those folks to yarnbomb my bike rack or stop sign.
But a comment by Mayor Darrell Mussatto did catch my attention. He mentioned the independent board that buys books for our libraries, an institution close to my heart. I would be the first to march on city hall if our council decided to pick and choose what books we should be reading, even though tax dollars pay for those books. I spent a sheepish hour picking through the smuttiest part of the City of North Vancouver library, and let me assure you there are books there that contain scenes that would certainly warrant an X rating should they ever be filmed. Are they art? I say yes.
Wrapping stop signs with wool is no worse a misuse of taxpayers' money than any other public art project. I don't like it, but it's a very dangerous precedent for our elected officials to be cherrypicking the art they like or don't like. We hire folks to give their opinion on this stuff and they say that putting high-school kids and seniors in the same room is worthwhile. Seeing every tree in Victoria Park sheathed in knitting and giving some folks a chuckle is worthwhile. And at the end of the day, $7,500 really isn't that much money out of a $58million city budget.
It's easy to believe in principles when you like the outcome. It's when you don't like those outcomes that you find out how much you really believe in them. I believe in a free market of ideas. I don't like yarnbombing, but I don't think city council should be in the public art business.
