Dear Mayor McGinn, Do This! Sincerely, Anonymous: PART 4

We asked important members of the arts community to weigh in on what Seattle Mayor McGinn should do about the arts (and sometimes to ventriloquize what they would like to hear him say in place of his speech at this year’s Mayor’s Arts Awards ceremony). Here are some of their thoughts.

(Continued from Part 3)

A Well-Known Newspaper Critic:

The SIFF Board will be dissolved and replaced by local film critics, who will curate the festival with an eye to quality, not quantity; the number of venues for the festival will expand so that people in all parts of the city will be able to see most of the 125 feature films on the schedule.   Prices will be reduced so that everyone in the city will be able to afford a full series pass. Galas and other elitist activities will be discontinued, with the exception of the opening night festivities.

Bumbershoot will expand into every available venue in the Seattle Center, including McCaw Hall, Mercer Arena and Key Arena. Prices will be reduced to $10 a day. One Reel will cease their involvement in the festival, which will be curated by a volunteer staff of local booking agents.

Since many tourists are drawn to Seattle by the street performers who frequent the Public Market and other destination neighborhoods, the City of Seattle will put all street performers on the payroll, with all the benefits enjoyed by other city employees. It is a crime that Seattle rakes in the tourist dollars via these performers, who must look to benefit concerts to help defray costs of health emergencies, and that few of these people receive any dental care at all.

A Documentary Filmmaker:

McGinn should declare the 520 bridge an extension of the sculpture garden. Waterfront is waterfront, right? Do it up in a Christo wrap, add a bit of Thomas the Train…voila!

A Major Art Blogger:

[McGinn] needs to start by actually discovering that there is art going on in town. You should begin the speech as though it were a report done for him by his staff about "the existence of such things in the city as museums, theaters, etc., where diverse entertainments for the people are housed and showcased." That's about where he's at.

An Important Art Curator:

I guess the main thing I would like him to talk about would be how important the arts are to the community for all the reasons we in the arts know, but many others don’t, such as how much money the arts bring in to the community (more than sports), how crucial the arts are to learning for students—that studying music for example increases abilities in math, and that it attracts and keeps creative people in Seattle. Also, in tough times it enriches the spirit and encourages imagination. Oops—clients are filtering in early, got to go—

A Popular Publicist:

Subsidized theatre tickets for all low-income residents of Seattle, and mandatory Nutcracker attendance for all citizens!

Another Well-Known Newspaper Critic:

Citizen panel to assess the state of the arts in Seattle, most particularly the Seattle Symphony (then, as now, in parlous times), which got its own separate panel of arts activists and donors. The result was a regional arts stabilization process that shored up the bulwarks for some time to come, also providing a model for future fiscal responsibility (every arts institution was supposed to keep a "working cash reserve" that was to be used for special productions, instead of going into debt). Those fiscal standards have lapsed, perhaps inevitably, in the current struggling economy that makes the mid-80s seem like a veritable boom of prosperity. It would be great to have a mayor who declared that assessing and shoring up the health of the major regional arts groups is a job for the city and its concerned citizens – in return for major ticket concessions for the greater-Seattle citizenry, to make a portion of the tickets affordable to wider audiences.

A Major Tech Thinker:

I’d like to hear the mayor decide that creativity is key to global competitiveness and to having a productive, prepared workforce (as evidenced by creative minds and ideas behind many of the local tech and clean energy startups). And even if it’s not a U.S. Department of Education mandate, he will increase the amount of arts education in Seattle public schools to tie together the existing language arts and mathematics requirements. He’ll note that STEM education and the arts can co-exist, creating a whole greater than the individual parts with arts as the glue to tie it all together and spur new connections and a-ha moments.

He’ll do this by:

• Utilizing the ArtsEd Washington curriculum;

• Inviting local artists, no matter what their level of prominence, to volunteer in the schools (and make it easy for them to do so);

• Provide information to parents on how they can foster creative thinking and problem solving through the arts.

Continue to Part 5