BAY SCULPTURE BATTLE LOOMS

If ever an issue were steeped in ambivalence, it’s this sculptural question: Should San Diego commission a $300,000 Marina Park sculpture from renowned New York artist Ellsworth Kelly? Hardly a burning issue, but it has ignited the spark of controversy.

Proponents of the commission say Kelly can deliver the sort of landmark artwork that this city needs; opponents don’t deny that, but object to the procedure by which Kelly was chosen.

The proponent is the San Diego Unified Port District, which has given Kelly a preliminary go-ahead solely on the recommendation of its arts advisory panel. Opposition is being mustered by San Diego’s Combined Organization of Visual Artists, which charges the Port District with unfairness, and possibly breaking the law, in failing to subject the commission to open bidding and open competition. In other words, local artists never stood a chance of scoring this fat commission. The organization’s objections are articulated in a rather ambivalent letter to the Port District from La Jolla attorney Peter H. Karlen.

“Naturally, none of us wish San Diego to remain provincial by beautifying and decorating itself using its own talents,” the letter reads. “We want to be open to outside artistic influences . . . Nevertheless, there is always the possibility that a local San Diego artist or an artist from elsewhere in California might be able to submit a proposal which . . . might be more suitable for the project. Furthermore, all of the other entries which would have been received would have given . . . a better idea of what the winning artist should do.”

Ha ha. Artists of Kelly’s stature don’t compete for commissions--they accept or reject them. So if you’re dead set on commissioning a name as big as Kelly, you don’t waste time with competitions. That’s the approach being taken by the Port District, which has responded to Karlen’s challenge by asserting its legal right to commission art, while leaders on both sides of the issue privately agree that provincialism is a curse and San Diego needs public art as good as Kelly’s.

Obviously, there’s a larger issue looming here, a burgeoning power play over just how and by whom San Diego’s public arts future is going to be shaped. The city’s newly created Public Arts Advisory Board, led by Ed Pieters, who launched the Combined Organization of Visual Artists, wants to be the city’s arts czar--but so far it lacks any purse-string power, and any power at all over the Port District. Will the battle for arts supremacy be fought on the San Diego waterfront?

GLOBE GAB: Old Globe Theatre artistic director Jack O’Brien has announced six productions--three chestnuts and three San Diego premieres--for the Globe’s summer Festival Season, which culminates the Jubilee Year of the Balboa Park theater complex.

Set to inaugurate the rebuilt, renamed outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Stage--victim of a recent arson fire--will be O’Brien’s June 7-Sept. 1 staging of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with which the original Festival Stage was inaugurated in 1978. Noel Coward’s classic “Hay Fever,” last produced in 1971 at the Old Globe, plays June 12-Sept. 1 at the main stage. And June 5-Sept. 1 at the intimate Cassius Carter Centre Stage, it’s the local premiere of the two-character comedy “Greater Tuna.”

Next, the Carter runs Tina Howe’s 1983 off-Broadway comedy hit, “Painting Churches,” July 19-Sept. 22, to be directed by Old Globe associate director Robert Berlinger. The third local premiere is Dion Boucicault’s 19th-Century comedy of manners, “London Assurance,” set for July 21-Sept. 22 at the Festival Stage. Finally, Shakespeare’s “Richard III” is set for the main stage July 26-Sept. 22, directed by another associate director, Joseph Hardy. It will mark the 500th production to be mounted in the Globe’s 50-year history.

ARTBEATS: The San Diego Symphony has named developer Morgan Dene Oliver to chair its Fox Theatre renovation committee. Oliver is principal in the local firm of Oliver McMillan, and will be responsible for engaging and coordinating consultants and contractors for the renovation of the Fox in time for the orchestra to begin its 1985-86 residency there. Escrow on the theater was closed in November, and an announcement of an acoustician and contractors is forthcoming . . .

Avant-garde sounds flare again tonight at 8, at UC San Diego’s Center for Music Experiment on the Warren College campus, when David Rosenboom and William Winant, of Mills College, offer “Zones of Influence” . . . Artist Ellen Phillips, a graduate student at San Diego State University, will become SDSU’s first Master of Fine Arts candidate to present an exhibition on campus. Her “Walls and Barriers,” an installation-environment of her metal mesh work, runs Jan. 28 to Feb. 1 at SDSU’s Masters’ Gallery . . .

The San Diego Community Foundation has awarded $10,000 to the San Diego Theatre Foundation. The foundation is trying to raise $80,000 to establish a central downtown ticket booth for performing arts events . . . Mr. and Mrs. Joseph and Ingrid Hibben have donated $20,000 to the San Diego Opera’s recitalist program at the Old Globe Theatre.