DEPARTING WRITER’S HOPES FOR SAN DIEGO

To the extent that it’s mine, this column won’t appear next week, because this columnist will have left by then to work for a newspaper on the East Coast. The move is prompted by the usual mix of motives and emotions--mainly, a desire to return to roots and family, the challenge of a new assignment, the lure of new horizons. But I’ll take with me a strong sense of having left a city culturally on the brink of big things, and the conviction that my successor will have an awful lot to write about.

Three years in San Diego have shown me that what was once a great big small town, sun-kissed yet shadowed by Los Angeles, has been quick to take on a national profile. The Old Globe Theatre winning its long-deserved Tony Award, or the La Jolla Playhouse sending its “Big River” to triumph on Broadway may not have helped quite as much, in mass-appeal terms, as the Padres winning the National League pennant, but San Diego is on the map, and damn the skeptics’ torpedoes.

What I’ll be watching for from 3,000 miles away is all the news to come, and soon, regarding this city’s artscape. I hope the news will be good. I hope the Port District finally allows Ellsworth Kelly to build his magnum opus to date--a stainless steel monolith, a monument to urban aspiration--on the waterfront finger of Embarcadero Park.

If anything, the city’s immediate public arts future seems bound up in the Kelly issue. It’s an issue emotionally divided between those who distrust the renowned artist’s minimal abstractions, who view them as cold symbols of an elite modern art Establishment, and those who believe that a grand public artwork on the cutting edge of modernism is just the sort of statement this city has to make.

In fairness, this is not simply a conflict between the city’s conservative tradition and its prospects for an innovative future. It’s part of a national conflict in which a notion of art-for-art’s-sake is at odds with a notion of art-for-the-people. In Manhattan--that radical, sophisticated citadel--Kelly’s peer Richard Serra has placed his massive, obstructive “Tilted Arc” sculpture in a public plaza, and the public outcry now threatens to have it removed altogether.

The Kelly sculpture, if approved, isn’t likely to face a similar fate--it is “objectively” beautiful, and will obstruct nothing--but those who oppose it fear that it will become the city’s aesthetic logo, coolly and inscrutably against the grain of the city’s warmth and human scale. The pro-Kelly forces assure that it will be only one--an important one, but still only one--of many and varied aesthetic statements in 21st-Century San Diego. And so let it be. But better no Kelly, nothing at all in the Embarcadero site, than the sort of kitschy, much-publicized “alternative” sculpture proposed by a local arts faction. That would be the bad news I hope not to hear.

Come November, something I probably won’t hear is the sound of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra making its much-ballyhooed bow in its new Symphony Hall downtown. That’s another story of national import, especially now that the orchestra and its musical director, David Atherton, have won so much acclaim in so short a time since rebounding from near-financial collapse. If Atherton and his players don’t hit new heights in their new home, I’ll be surprised.

I’ll be less surprised if the downtown commercial and residential renaissance doesn’t pan out as hoped, but it seems that the arts will play a major role in determining that. Will the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art find a downtown warehouse annex to help display its permanent collection and major new acquisitions? Will the San Diego Art Center transform the historic Balboa Theater, in the shoulder of the Horton Plaza shopping center, into a cutting-edge showplace for modern art, architecture and design displays? And will downtown sustain and build on its reputation as an affordable haven for visual and performing artists?

If any one group has a fix on the city’s arts future, it’s the recently created Public Arts Advisory Board. With its mix of artists, architects, administrators, educators, businessmen and attorneys, the board may not yet have any power to fund, but its influence is being felt. It is pushing for a percent-for-art ordinance, a master plan for the arts, and some visionary public art ideas that deserve serious consideration.

Architect and board member Rob Wellington Quigley, for one, has hatched an ambitious, 12-year “Citygates” project, by which monumental public sculpture, to be chosen via competition, would grace six major freeway entrances to the city. It’s the sort of idea that makes this once and future easterner look forward to a future San Diego visit--one in which all the promise of this extraordinary place can be seen fulfilled. The watch goes on.