If Marcia Higgins, Steve Kunselman, Sandi Smith and Sabra Briere, Mike Anglin and Jane Lumm support that measure, it passes.

The council has gotten its ankles tangled up a bit in its effort to do some fancy footwork. As the Chronicle noted in a recent column [link], the ordinance attempts to link art to a function in a sometimes confounded way. (This was presumably to justify using public funds that were assessed to fill a function.) The idea about the crosswalk art is an example of this. I like pretty crosswalks too, and the example I clicked on looks nice. But is it art?

As I tried to discuss in a recent blog post [link], the proponents of this measure are big on symbolism about Art and also about its supposed value as an economic development tool. But it seems that more and more the choices being made are for decoration, not Art. Admittedly, my qualifications for discussing Art are a liberal arts education and a very fine drawing of a dissected lobster. Still, I doubt that the chance visitor to Ann Arbor is going to inhale deeply upon viewing our decorative crosswalks and declare: “Ann Arbor has a soul for Art and I want to relocate here!”

The unrelentingly narrow vision of those who support this program astonishes me.