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A silent tribute to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces who have died in the two conflicts in Iraq is traveling around the country. Recently it stopped here in St. Petersburg. The day I took this photo, about two weeks ago, a volunteer was adding two more flags — one flag for each of two soldiers who had been killed the day before. That brought the total number of flags on display to 4,440. A sad number. The grassy lot on which the tribute was set up was a sea of red, white and blue. The emphasis here should be on red, for the blood each shed to protect us from those who wish us ill.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to my Reader! It’s hard to explain Christmas in Florida to someone who’s shoveling a foot of snow off his sidewalk. The season is a unique experience when you can go swimming at the beach on Christmas Day. Roy Peter Clark, dean of the Poynter Institute of Media Studies, has a very musical description of what it’s all about here during this special time of the year. It’s very funny, and you might even end up humming the tune afterwards!
A story on our local Channel 8 News a few days ago still has me riled. The station’s investigative reporter, Steve Andrews, talked to Hillsborough County Commission Chairman James Norman about whether requirements for buying art for publicly-funded buildings should be eliminated. County regs there require the county to allocate 1 percent of a building’s construction costs to the purchase and installation of art for the site. Public art in Pinellas County is paid for by the Penny for Pinellas tax. The background of the story was the financial struggles county governments could have because of Tallahassee-mandated reductions in property taxes.
Picking on public art projects as a means of cutting county budget expenses is like complaining about the janitor’s salary when the CEO gets $40 million a year. Eliminating the 1 percent of public funds for art will do absolutely nothing to deal with the real budget problems local governments have and anticipate having, depending on what happens in Tallahassee. While the impact of eliminating such funding would be minimal to the average county budget, the lives of Floridians and anyone who visits here would be all the more impoverished.
Art in public places dresses up the often bland architecture which contains the workings of our civic life. Public art provides a spot of beauty, and gives us something to talk about, to think about, and perhaps just laugh about.
Public art also is a signal to visitors of our community’s values. It says we value beauty over mediocrity. It says we are intelligent and contemplative. It says we tolerate, if not embrace, diversity. It says we are a community of individuals, not automatons. It says “creative people live here,” something to be sought after, ala Richard Florida’s book.
Commissioner Norman said he would fund public art when it brings art to Hillsborough County. I have to ask Commissioner Norman — how long has it been since you left your house? The Tampa Bay area each year hosts two of the finest art shows in the state, if not the Southeast: Gasparilla in Tampa, and Mainsail in St. Petersburg. Seemingly every community in Pinellas County has some sort of art festival at least once a year. Galleries here house works from world-class artists — the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg and the Leepa-Ratner in Palm Harbor. Notable painters such as James Rosenquist and James Michaels, to name only two, live and work here. The presence of these brick and blood notables attracts lesser known artists to this area. In turn, this convocation of national, regional, and local artists attracts tourists and art afficionados to the area, where they spend money then go back home and tell their friends about the nice things they saw.
And we’ve only talked about the visual arts. The area also is home to writers, authors and actors too numerous to count. Fine performances go on virtually 365 days a year at the many performance venues in the area. I’ll put the facilities of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center or Ruth Eckerd Hall up against any Broadway theater any day.
There is a long tradition in Western culture of publicly funded arts. Much of the art that fills the public squares of Europe or the halls of the world’s museums was commissioned by the state. Commissioner Norman might think he could save a few bucks by eliminating public art, but in the long term, we would all be much poorer for it.
No, it’s not the loud shirt. No, it’s not that he was playing at a party in Safety Harbor, Florida. It’s the fact that this musician brought both sneakers and sandals, and he’s not wearing either pair. He’s playing barefoot.
