Frances, the complete report hasn’t been made public but there was an open house late last year which discussed most of what’s in the report. It seems like you are somewhat aware of the details with your mention of the Tate Modern as that is exactly what was used as the baseline.
That announcement even caught the VAG off guard as well, as they had invested a lot of time and effort into the cultural precinct concept at the Bus depot site. Some powerful members still feel very strongly towards the Larwill Park site and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it revert back there.
I prefer the Georgia St location as well but feel something is needed down in NEFC to attract the masses, and not a public square.

Michael Phillips:
VAG management says that its exhibition space in its current location is restricted enough that only something like 15% of its collection can be displayed at any one time. The fact that much of that collection is fusty late-Victorian-era work that no one except scholars of the mediocre would want to see is beside the point (in fairness, the VAG actually has some good modern work in its vaults, including an important Kienholz piece and an excellent photography collection). Moreover, the VAG also claims that it has to pass on the kind of major international exhibitions commonly seen in Toronto and Montreal due to that same lack of space.

I think there’s no argument that the VAG needs more room. Something that concerns me is that if money remains tight– or even if it doesn’t– the city may decide to finance a new gallery by selling the old courthouse location to a major developer. It would be almost impossible to adapt the building to a new use; and as for the courthouse’s heritage status, that means less than nothing in a city where money talks as loudly as it does in Vancouver.

If money was not a problem, an interesting compromise might be reached whereby a new gallery was built wherever and used for major traveling exhibits and the like while the courthouse space was used for a permanent Emily Carr exhibit, or material equally crowd-pleasing from the permanent collection (if there is any such thing), or perhaps some kind of performance space.

In any case, MP, I’m charmed by your well-meant but somewhat naive suggestion to take “$200-400 million” and do some “contemporary art shopping and a few iconic older names”. Have you checked the prices being realized at auction by work by major artists in the past few years? In 2006, David Geffen sold off a Pollock, a de Kooning and a Jasper Johns for $14o million, $137 million, and $80 million respectively. Well, how about a Monet instead? A nice one went for $41 million in New York last month. Even with the ongoing economic crisis, which has lowered auction prices for major crowd-drawing works of art somewhat, the art market still routinely buys and sells at levels stratospheric enough to prevent all but a tiny handful of institutions from acquiring them; and then only with government help, as a rule. Even the Getty, the wealthiest art museum in the world, has had to drastically cut its budget recently after seeing the value of its massive endowment plummet with the rest of the economy.

Nice idea, though, MP. Know any spendthrift billionaires who are culturally inclined?
gmgw

Tate Modern: the huge bulk of masonry, with its smoke stack is a work of art in itself.

No Vancouver talent can match that . . . leave VAG where it is . . .

gmgw:

The media always pick out the really high-value sales for the big iconic pieces, but the “normal” market for these artists is much lower. For instance look at the estimated prices (which were considered expensive) for a major art sale at the top of the market in 2007:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/feb/01/art.artnews

200M pounds is about 350M dollars, well in the range of the art gallery move budget estimate, and you know those budget estimates only move in one direction. So in other words, for the same price or less we could buy the entire 4-day Sotheby sale. We could always then take a quarter of such a stock of art and trade it around for the top works of other galleries on an ongoing basis.

To find space for this we would probably have to sell the bulk of the existing collection to other galleries.

So the two options are A) a new building who knows where to house the same or lesser quality art in much greater quantity vs. B) the existing beautiful building in the centre of downtown to house world class art with most of the existing collection sold off to other galleries.

Or C) drug rehabilitation.

C > B > A

Frances Bula said: …”There are many who’ve criticized Vancouver over the years for creating such a boring waterfront, …”

And if you lived in, say the Begbie School neighbourhood, you would have no waterfront at all.

CBUT did a set of camera-in-the-car shots some decades ago of the waterfront from Boundary to downtown along the formerly free access pierside streets and played it back in fast motion.

There were waterfront cafes, fishing places, places where you could touch the water and come up alongside huge ships.

You can’t do that now. Vancouver has lost its heritage working waterfront to the false claims of security of the docks, cutting off the entire eastside from easy access to the water in the 21st century.

My recollection is the Premier hand-picked Bing Thom for the Cultural Precinct and, not liking the community-based approach his plan took, fired him and went for the “starchitect” idea of the VAG on False Creek as his grand legacy to the City. His double-dipping right hand man, Ken Dobbell (that bastion of the arts community) was hired by the City and wrote the Cultural Precinct Plan with Sue Harvey, presented to council back in Oct. 2006 (guess how much the City paid him?).

The negotiations to move the VAG to FC were behind closed doors with Bartletts, who easily won the biggest piece of the Cultural Precinct pie: the “surprise” location and a cheque for $50 million. None of this was a surprise to Bartletts, she was in on it from the start! Understandably, the arts community (sans the VAG) was horrified to find out the lengthy public consultation process was a total sham when the Premier made his “surprise” announcement.

So after all this backroom dealing, I find it sublimely ironic to hear the VAG chair now say, “I’m a bit shocked they would take it to a public forum like this without a conversation with us.”

Bing Thom talked at a lecture a while ago about the concept he had developed for the old bus depot side, with many cultural institutions and businesses creating, what he called, a “cultural Granville Island”, with the VAG above the fray in the upper floors. The VAG liked the site but not the competition/closeness of others. They want the starchitecture, that’s why they have also been cool on the idea of converting the postal headquarters on Georgia St. into their new home. Not enough architectural firepower for them in a conversion (though, of course, that’s a ridiculous position to take).
The VAG has ambition, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’ve made amazing progress since twenty years ago. They need more space not for their permanent collection, which isn’t that fantastic except for the BC stuff, but for exhibitions. Their place, though, should be in downtown.
The postal headquarter is a fantastic building with great opportunity, conversion to a cultural building would allow to maintain the heritage while bringing public life into it. Let’s put the VAG there, and give the courthouse to the Museum of Vancouver.

Richard Henriquez is not a starchitect. He is an excellent architect.

Maybe Gordo’s NEFC art gallery pronouncement will vapourize along with the one about the giant arches over Robson Square.

Actually, Richard, the development fees on the nearly two dozen new towers planned or proposed for NEFC– a veritable orgy of densification– are going to pay for the new retractable roof on BC Place stadium. At least that’s the City’s plan at present, and that’s why City planners are facilitating a developer’s paradise down there. If those fees were instead to be directed toward something culturally stimulating (in a town that’s in dire need of such stimulation), like a new art gallery, rather than to keeping the jocks happy, I might at least have found that a small mitigating factor in years to come when I look to NEFC and see the planning abomination that it is currently doomed to become.
gmgw

Actually …it WAS the Tate Modern that reinvigorated the South Bank….not just the art (although I am an art lover). Tate Modern is a dynamic building and meeting place. People go there just to experience the architecture. I know, I worked there for a number of years and encountered this phenomenon nearly every day.