Some days, the advertisements in your daily newspaper are just as fascinating as the stories. Today was one of those days. The Review section was a ringer with a ginormous double-page ad (not sure how much it costs, but believe it might be more than I earn in a year) advertising: A Vancouver masterpiece: A new home for the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Accompanying it, a long essay on why the gallery should move: ” While our current courthouse building on Robson Square has been a wonderful home for the past 27 years … After a thorough planning process … Our aim is to design and build a landmark art museum for all of British Columbia …” and so on.
Accompanying it are supporting statements by artists Jeff Wall, Gordon Smith and Doug Coupland, developer Terry Hui, power guy Jake Ker, and Tourism Vancouver CEO Rick Antonson. Okay, the big guns are out.
What you won’t see in the ad, of course, is that there is a cluster of developers and architects in town who are out lobbying just as hard to have the gallery stay where it is.
And on the back page, an advertisement about the awards for the Association of Women in Finance. In the top row, for performance and excellence, Patrice Impey, Vision Vancouver’s new hire who heads up the finance department.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Bill Lee // May 9, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Madame Bula is, of course, mentioning the Globe ad. The same double page spread also showed up in the Vancouver Sun. So double the costs, $80,000 for Globe? Similar for Sun?
Now that the public building of the Olympics is over, the contract firms are looking for a new public money project to keep their crews working at full tilt.
These are the economic dangers from excessive reliance on public works projects, and not enough private industrial construction renewal.
2 Dan Cooper // May 10, 2010 at 10:13 am
Previously I liked the idea of this proposed move, but I changed my mind once I understood that VAG wants the city to donate the new property to them. Considering the recent uproar over those evil, exhorbitant subsidies for low-income housing at Millenium Water, I can’t see giving an entire city block away to an organization that already has a prime chunk of property. (Downtown land doesn’t come cheap….well, unless of course you happen to be a major developer making good money renting out a multi-acre waterfront property that was supposed to be a park, but paying less in tax for it than you would for an average single-family house. But I digress!) Even if VAG’s current property reverted to the city, being what and where it is I think it would and should continue in some kind of cultural/historical use, and so would not compensate the city financially for the gift of the new property.
3 booge // May 10, 2010 at 2:33 pm
“What you won’t see in the ad, of course, is that there is a cluster of developers and architects in town who are out lobbying just as hard to have the gallery stay where it is.”
Well I hope we get to hear their side of things.
4 Urbanismo // May 10, 2010 at 3:05 pm
@ Bill L . . . “the contract firms are looking for a new public money project to keep their crews working at full tilt.”
Yup, make ‘um stand on their own two feet for a change . . .
Count me in booge. I don’t live in town now but I was a trustee when the big Rattenbury’s became the VAG.
5 Ian // May 12, 2010 at 10:49 am
I think the ads were a big mistake. They were written in a very defensive tone. A reader who didn’t know there were two sides to this issue can tell that there are opposing forces just by reading the ads and the letters published in support. I’m not really taking a position either way, but if the intent of the ads was to rally the public around the idea of an exciting new civic facility, they failed miserably.
6 Bill Lee // May 15, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Double page colour advert in the Georgia Straight of week of 13 May-19 May.
And Alan Garr has a bash this week,
Art elite at war over VAG’s future
http://www.vancourier.com/columnists/elite+over+future/3025684/story.html
Meanwhile, self-aggrandizing developer Michael Audin ( Linkname: Vancouver Art Gallery seeks federal money, city land for new location
URL: http://www.vancourier.com/news/Vancouver+Gallery+seeks+federal+money+city+land+location/3024837/story.html )
” A member of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s board of trustees believes the federal government should help fund the estimated $300 million cost of building a new gallery….”
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