It is a train wreck waiting to happen, the Titanic heading for that iceberg. Pick your metaphor to describe the current state of plans to build a new Vancouver Art Gallery. With the deadline in the agreement with the city just a few days away, the probability of the VAG project succeeding is slim to none.
Two years ago, the gallery and its director, Kathleen Bartels, cut the deal with city council. The city would give the VAG a prime location, two of the three acres of the property known as Larwill Park adjacent to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
Among other things, the VAG committed to raising $150 million dollars from federal and provincial funding. This was on top of the $50 million already committed by the province. (Actually, former Heritage Minister James Moore said almost immediately that there was no way the federal government would put up any money, let alone $100 million. The province has since said its $50 million is all there is.)
Last month in a story about the impending deadline by the Vancouver Sun’s Jeff Lee, Bartels said that the VAG never intended to meet that deadline. Her blunt declaration hit city hall with all the force of a sucker punch.
That’s chutzpah: squeeze everything you want out of a deal, then say that you never intended to keep your end of the bargain.
And then ask for more time.
It wasn’t that the VAG had simply fallen a bit short in its efforts to raise the $150 million; it hadn’t even raised a nickel. City hall politicos weren’t simply disappointed, they were pissed off.
When the deal was originally struck there was the intention, as Coun. Geoff Meggs told me this week, to extend the deadline. But that was with the expectation that the VAG would be well on its way to meeting the terms of the agreement.
Now both Meggs and Coun. Raymond Louie say — on the record — what they are hearing is “disturbing.”
Incidentally, VAG chair Bruce Wright is apparently telling city hall privately that Bartels was misquoted. She didn’t say that at all.
My view: That is not to be believed or the VAG would have made the point publicly.
But as Meggs says, the inability to find funding is only part of the VAG’s failure to meet its promise to council. In a March 10 letter from the mayor’s office to Wright and Bartels, Gregor Robertson lists a series of commitments the VAG made to get the deal. They were all still outstanding.
That included agreement “to acknowledge and work with the city’s land use policies”; provide development plans that fit within the two acres; change the VAG board structure to make a non-voting place for the mayor or his delegate, given the city’s multi-million dollar land gift and the fact the city is the biggest funder of the VAG operations to a level unheard of in any other municipality in Canada. The VAG also has to agree that the art collection is in fact the property of the City of Vancouver and always has been. And the VAG has to provide a plan for public consultation as this project goes ahead.
So as Meggs says, money aside, it is most amazing that almost two years into this deal and with a looming deadline, that none of this has been done and would require a letter from Robertson to lay that out.
To make matters worse, longtime VAG board member Michael Audain — frustrated with the slow process — quit the board last summer and, in spite of being made honorary chair for life, he took his very deep pockets and his exquisite collection of First Nations art with him. He appears to be pursuing an alternative approach to art gallery venues — an approach supported by VAG project critic Bob Rennie — ones that are smaller and dispersed and that spend more on the art and less on the building.
Audain put money into the Gordon Smith gallery in West Vancouver and Presentation House in North Van. And he is about to open his own $40 million gallery in Whistler.
Council may indeed hold its nose and extend the deadline for the VAG, not because it thinks it will do any good, but because, with a federal election on the horizon, it doesn’t want to be accused of blocking an outside chance of federal money being promised.
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