Years ago, Los Angeles implemented a 1% tax on new buildings of a certain size, with the money going to public art. The results have been pretty sad overall. There exists a few famous pieces that aren't bad, but compared to what goes in Europe (still imperfect of course), it's overall a little embarrassing. Alice Konitz, a young artist emigre living in LA with a recent feature by Michael Ned Holte in Artforum, recently received a public commission at the new Silver Lake library being built on Glendale and SIlver Lake Blvd. A good choice and a real one, but overall the abstract corporate art and hideous murals tend to overwhelm any of the few good decisions regarding publicly-funded public art in Los Angeles. Laurie Firstenberg of LAXART has attempted to push the tide for public art towards a more vital and contemporary program, but one non-profit agency with only so much funding can't have the same effect as the awesome force of a public agency with somebody knowledgeable at the helm.

The cultural affairs and civic art program overall in LA, as far as I can tell, has been worse than embarrassing, it's been irrelevant. Irrelevant to whom exactly, at first to me. I'm some who pays attention, and there hasn't been anything to pay attention to. Furthermore, it seems irrelevant to those working in cultural production, if not only for those covering cultural production in the city (like me). We should be creating landmarks by artists important to Los Angeles, not destroying them haphazardly (remember the Ed Ruscha mural that got painted over downtown, whoops). Say what you will about LACMA's new extension (and I've said my fair share of hard remarks), the Chris Burden piece satisfies all the critieria for a amazing public art project. It's accessible from the street by everybody, it's by an important artist both for the city and the international art community, and, perhaps more subjectively, it looks amazing. Important to the city, doesn't necessarily mean a LA resident (though this helps). Just to continue with this example, Burden's piece is really about LA. Burden had collected and refurbished scores of old LA streetlights, and gathered together make a spectacular gleaming birthday cake for the city. Olafur Eliasson's recent waterfalls piece in New York satisfies a lot of the same criteria, though Eliasson isn't a New York artist per se.

Par of the problem is of course the lack of cultural infrastructure to connect cultural producers, from the marginal to the mainstream and then to successfully export the idea outside the city. Certain figures have tried to fill the vacuum, like FYA and Artslant.com, but neither have fully succeeded, if only because the project is bigger than one or two agencies and requires a strategic plan.

The reason I go into this diatribe about the City of Angels and the territory it dominates, is that the county is hiring a new Director of Civic Arts Programs, I'm a little too young to care to work in the hulking bureaucracy of municipal politics, but maybe you, yes you, are not. We really need someone really good if we are ever going to mature as an international city. So apply already!