CRA--A BOLD NEW WORLD DOWNTOWN?

With the Community Redevelopment Agency as its art director, the face of downtown Los Angeles is changing. If the CRA has its way, the central city’s soul will be uplifted in the process: The agency wants nothing less than to make public art “a way of life,” “a source of identity” and “a concrete form of civic pride,” according to its documents.

These wishes have fiscal clout and bureaucratic authority behind them, under a redevelopment plan adoped by the L.A. City Council. During the next five years the agency expects to spend about $2 million annually on art in the downtown areas under its jurisdiction. Funds will come from a Percent for Art requirement, which compels land developers to spend 1% of their costs (less land) on art. A maximum of 60% of the art monies will buy permanent, on-site pieces; the remaining 40% or more will go to a trust fund that will provide for more artworks, sponsor cultural programming and give aid to arts facilities from Bunker Hill to Little Tokyo.

Exactly how this plan will transpire is still a hot topic of speculation, but by all accounts the CRA’s potential for enhancing downtown’s visual art image is considerable.

“We’re not just building sand castles. We are permanently altering our world, and the stakes are enormous,” said Marc Pally, arts consultant for the agency. An artist and arts administrator, Pally was hired in January to write a complex document outlining the CRA’s newly adopted Art in Public Places Program.

Now ensconced in a small office on the seventh floor of the Banco Popular at 4th and Spring streets, Pally is resident adviser on the program but he takes no credit for dreaming up the controversial policy. The innovative trust fund--unique to Los Angeles--is the brainchild of the agency’s former senior planner, Ari Sikora, whom Pally considers “a visionary.” (Sikora is also credited with the ingenious plan to marshal the Percent for Art funds in California Plaza to create the Museum of Contemporary Art, currently under construction.) The Percent for Art concept is more than two decades old in Los Angeles and an active presence in several other California cities.

Since 1964, when the CRA instituted its first Percent for Art requirement (while negotiating for the Union Bank building), the agency has administered projects that have brought $1.1-million worth of works by five major sculptors to Wells Fargo, a monumental piece by Louise Nevelson and a group of sculptures by other contemporary masters to Crocker Center at a total cost of $1.8 million, and, most recently, Eugene Sturman’s “Homage to Cabrillo: Venetian Quadrant” to the International Tower at 9th and Figueroa streets. Sturman’s $250,000 commission is an adventurous work merging elements of antiquity with the Space Age in a 33-foot-tall tribute to creativity and curiosity.

Such projects have established a Percent for Art tradition, but the agency always negotiated them on a case-by-case basis. Now the practice has been institutionalized as a consistent policy, complete with a complex set of guidelines. While the document spelling out those procedures has an air of finality, it also sparks important questions:

What art will be selected? “It must be contemporary,” said Pally, citing a case of a developer who wanted to fulfill his art requirement by “going to Italy and buying marble lions” for his building. “We told him that he was employing a living architect and a living landscape designer. He would also have to hire a living artist.” No marble lions need apply to redevelopment projects, but that leaves legions of other contenders. The kind of contemporary art finally accepted will depend on who picks it.

Who will choose the art? Each developer has three options: He may hire an artist himself, subject to agency approval; hire an art consultant, also subject to approval, or work with an art selection panel.

Who will serve on the panels? Artists and art professionals will be appointed by a yet-to-be-named Arts Advisory Committee--the same body that must approve developers’ personal choices of artists and consultants.

Who will serve on the committee? One representative from the business/development community, one member of the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, one artist and two arts professionals.

Who will choose the committee members? The CRA Board of Commissioners.

And what qualifies the commissioners to make that bottom-line decision on the aesthetic future of downtown Los Angeles? Nothing. They are political appointees with no art expertise.

“That’s the weak link,” Pally admitted, at the end of this line of questioning. Asked if commissioners could appoint their friends and thus fulfill the worst fears of the professional art community, he replied, “It could happen, but I don’t think it will. The commissioners asked for a system because they don’t feel comfortable approving art. They have to appoint professionals who can take the heat (resulting from unpopular artworks).”

“Requests for Qualifications,” inviting applicants for the committee and panels to send their resumes to the agency, will be circulated in a few weeks, according to Pally. He expects the first Arts Advisory Committee, which will serve a two-year term, to be in place around the first of the year. Pally said that CRA Administrator Edward Helfeld, who “is very passionate about the arts,” will screen applicants and make “strong recommendations” to the board, which will probably be accepted. “I don’t know what will happen three boards down the way, but I hope this will develop like the National Endowment for the Arts, with respect for getting the best possible input.”

A mid-August public forum on the proposed Art in Public Places Program produced an overwhelmingly positive response from the art-oriented crowd in attendance, but the plan also has detractors. The most solid opposition comes from developers who must submit to requirements pertaining to art, architectural design and traffic management in exchange for CRA help with financing and such sticky matters as density transfers.

“Developers tend to see this as a great interference, a bureaucratic intervention with their right to work unfettered by regulations,” Pally said. “We have to explain that we are acting for the city and that our clients are the citizens. What we can offer is a way of helping them and ultimately distinguishing their buildings.”

When it comes to the trust fund, some artists have joined the disgruntled developers. With developers required to give 40% of their art money to the fund--which provides for performing as well as visual arts--these artists fear that monies once earmarked for permanent artworks will decrease.

Pally thinks that this attitude fails to reflect the changing nature of art (toward a multidisciplinary approach) and that the fears are unfounded. “This is basically a visual art program,” he emphasized, “and for the first time, artists will be involved in the selection process.”

Another aspect of the program that has sparked unrest among traditional visual artists is a little noted option: Developers can be excused from 20% of their art expenditure if they give 80% of the required monies to the trust fund. Since developers are businessmen, the artists reason, why won’t they all choose this route?

“Developers have great resistance to giving to the trust fund at all,” Pally answers. “They prefer to have an artwork that is a fixed asset and a form of on-site identity. We established the 80% option because we needed an incentive to help the agency with the trust fund.”

While artists and businessmen continue to read the fine print of the program, Pally is concerned with “ensuring that commissions go to artists who are ready for them and need them.”

Above all, in his mind, is the agency’s “main thrust” of bringing artists into projects at their conception, and avoiding the afterthought creations that have been aptly dubbed “plop art.”

“It’s a mile-long path,” Pally said, referring to the complexity of public art’s processes, “but I’m very optimistic that you can go at least a foot or two along it.”