TheStar.com | entertainment | Cities fight to pay for portrait gallery - The Diigo Meta page

• 14 Nov 07
  

  Yule Heibel

  art_museum arts_funding canada competition p3s politics portrait_gallery public_buildings

  • Nine cities are invited to compete for the prize of securing the portrait gallery. Toronto is on the list, along with Halifax, Quebec City, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. The catch: this will be a private/public partnership.

    Translation: someone in the lucky city that wins gets to pay the bills so that Stephen Harper's government won't have to.

  • fascinating and inventive exercise in face-saving for a regime that, to put it mildly, lacks a vision of what investing in culture could do for this country. Despite a huge surplus, the Harperites are obsessed with pinching pennies
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • For a while there was a scheme to put the gallery in a Calgary office complex, but the idea was quietly ditched when it became clear it would increase costs.
    • Richard Florida, the influential urban guru who recently moved to Toronto from the U.S., believes that cities compete with one another for cultural dominance, but I doubt this was quite what he had in mind.

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