COMMENTARY : When Culver City Asks ‘Is It Art?’ It Misses the Point : Art: The City Council’s decision to allow some architecture to satisfy its one-percent-for-art requirement is misguided and, in the end, stingy.

This month, Culver City dramatically revised its one-percent-for-art program, which, like those in many American cities, had required that 1% of the construction cost of a new building be used to acquire or commission public art. The City Council has amended its policy to say that, in some circumstances, the building itself can satisfy the percent-for-art requirement.

Bizarrely, architecture can be considered art. A developer will now be able to petition Culver City’s City Council and argue that the architectural merits of his project are such that the goal of the percent-for-art requirement has already been met.

Public art, like funds for day care or traffic abatement, is a civic mandate, based on a belief that increased urban density inevitably causes social problems. Public art helps compensate for the negative impact. If the City Council agrees that a building’s architectural quality is sufficient, the public art requirement will be declared to have been fulfilled.

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Is this a bold and progressive proposal, which affirms the civic importance of architecture in American life, as its supporters claim? Or is it a backward semantic shuffle, built on confused ideas about art and beloved by architects who resist the idea of allowing artists into the building precinct?

Procedurally the plan raises disturbing issues. Most harmful is that if a building design fails to pass percent-for-art muster, only then would an artist be brought in to execute a project; public art claims a higher chance of success if the artist is brought in at the beginning of the design process, not the end.

Ultimately, however, the answer to whether the plan is forward-looking or self-serving doesn’t really matter. Either way, Culver City’s revised program is predicated on an erroneous belief that art and architecture can be interchangeable terms.

“Oh,” sniffed a Culver City bureaucrat when I pressed the distinction, “you’re one of those .”

Well, yes. I am. I’m one of those who thinks the distinction between art and architecture is more than a semantic quibble. Confusing the two, as Culver City has now done, manages more than merely to debase vocabulary. It does real damage, too.

The program’s false assumption that architecture can be art is based on a hoary idea, long since discredited. The obsolete reasoning went like this: If something is good enough, it transcends its lowly status as a mere artifact of the material world and ascends to a higher plane called art.

In Culver City, if the design of a building is good enough it will be said to have risen above the work-a-day world to become public art. A meritorious building floats in art heaven; all the rest is hellish.

This is the old-fashioned cleft between high art and low. If the moralizing distinction between high and low sounds familiar, it should. In our secular society, the idea of transcendent art simply shifts Christian doctrine away from people--if you’re good, you’ll go to heaven; if not, you’ll fry--and onto man-made objects.

The idea may be obsolete, but it remains a staple of our popular imagination. When a layman is faced with a painting he loathes, the typical exclamation is, “Yuck, that’s not art!” Of course, the painting is still art; what’s meant is that it’s not good enough to count.

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Mistakenly, we reserve the category of art as a term of privilege, which we bestow or withhold based on an assessment of quality. It gives us an ego-driven illusion of control over things that come our way--notably, control that can be asserted without having to examine blind prejudice.

What the City Council in Culver City has done is give itself the authority to decide when something qualifies as a work of art. A building, if they deem it good enough, is declared to have art in it. By default, all other buildings must tacitly be considered not to be art.

The spectacle of a city council passing such judgment would be funny, except for one thing. Governments are best left out of the business of determining what is or is not art. The next thing you know, they start deciding who is or is not a human being. From Joseph Stalin in the 1920s to Jesse Helms in the 1980s, the process is the same.

Instead of Culver City’s atavistic view, consider this: If a work of architecture is good enough, it transcends its lowly status and becomes--yes!--good architecture. If a building is bad enough, it is bad architecture, and if it’s mediocre enough, it’s mediocre architecture.

Never, however, is architecture art. Architecture is architecture.

And what’s wrong with that? Why should it be embarrassed about its status and seek some holier-than-thou consecration as a work of art?

Maybe an answer will be found among assumptions that have long guided percent-for-art programs. Architects might rightly chafe at the common belief that social ills are an inevitable result of the increased urban density their buildings produce, and that architecture is helpless to mitigate the harm while it’s supposed public art magically can.

Still, Culver City’s new plan is injudicious. Perhaps its most dispiriting feature is that art and architecture are pitted against each other in a contest for public worth.

The program revision doesn’t try to add good architecture to what it hopes will be good public art, produced under its auspices. Instead, architecture is set up to replace public art. Rather than expand the quality of social experience that art and architecture can both provide, the public world is shrunken into a small, fixed space, where competing amenities must duke it out for dominance.

Several years ago, during the widely publicized brawl over Richard Serra’s notorious public sculpture “Tilted Arc,” which was eventually removed from a plaza in New York City, an insightful issue was raised. The architecture-as-public-art idea in Culver City raises it anew.

Douglas Crimp, an art critic and admirer of Serra’s work, pointedly complained during testimony at a hearing about the sculpture’s proposed removal: “I am asked to line up on the side of sculpture against, say, those who are on the side of concerts or maybe picnic tables (for the plaza). But of course all these things have social functions, and one could imagine many, many more. It is a measure of the meager nature of our public social life that the public is asked to fight it out in a travesty of democratic procedure over the crumbs of social experience.”

It is another measure of that meagerness that Culver City’s percent-for-art program has now given us a stingy choice. You can line up on the side of architecture or on the side of art, but you can’t have both.

It’s time we started to ask why not.