If a glamorous project appeared dead before a hammer to build it was ever raised, the proposed new Vancouver Art Gallery was it.
At almost every turn since the idea was given birth more than a decade ago, the essential and most important question was: Where was the money going to come from to make this grand edifice come to life in the “village” by the sea known as Vancouver?
It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that money was the primary reason being cited this week for the project being shelved. The board of the VAG announced it will now start over in its quest to move on from its current home in the neoclassical former courthouse in the centre of the city it believes it has outgrown.
There will be many people in Vancouver applauding this decision. But there isn’t anyone who can crow about it more than Bob Rennie, the famous condo marketer and renowned international art maven, who predicted this outcome from the beginning.
“It was off the rails from 2012, but there wasn’t anyone who would listen,” Mr. Rennie told me in an interview.
In that regard, no one had their fingers planted in their ears more firmly than Kathleen Bartels, the former VAG boss who championed this project from its inception until she left the job in 2019 to assume the position of executive director and CEO of Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Ms. Bartels arrived in Vancouver from the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., a, shall we say, somewhat larger market. In her old job, people like music mogul David Geffen would fork over US$100-million with no strings attached. In her new city, getting money out of people’s wallets for the arts was a Sisyphean task.
Yet, she persisted.
She had a grand vision for a gallery that would take people’s breath away and give the city a signature piece of architecture. She hired the renowned Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron to design the building. When the renderings were unveiled they were indeed spectacular. The proposed structure featured an external surface of copper cladding with an Indigenous motif running throughout. It proposed using a massive amount of timber to reduce the building’s carbon footprint.
The budget estimate was $260-million.
As the years rolled on, two things became apparent: The original cost appraisal was way off and the gallery was having a hard time coming up with cash to pay for it. Ms. Bartel was often difficult to reach when it came to commenting on the shaky fundamentals underlying the project. Reports also began surfacing of Herzog & de Meuron’s projects elsewhere going massively over budget.
The projected costs climbed to $350-million, then $400-million, then $600-million. Even the last number seemed far-fetched in a city known for some of the most expensive real estate on the planet – and yet somehow they were going to build a world-class museum for $600-million – in Canadian dollars? Ah, no.
In the 12 years since the project was introduced, the gallery raised somewhere in the neighbourhood of $350-million.
“In a dozen years that’s all they could raise, which really says it all,” said Mr. Rennie.
You can see the large, gaping chasm between the dreams and ambitions of Ms. Bartel and the reality of the city in which she found herself working.
Vancouver is a breathtakingly natural wonder. But it’s more of a getaway for the rich, not a place in which they live to earn their money.
“You have to understand the culture of our city,” said Mr. Rennie, who understands it as well as anyone. “We don’t have head offices that throw money around for public engagement and cultural philanthropy. We just don’t have that social scene.”
It’s a city where people live their lives outdoors and donate to health care initiatives, not art galleries. This isn’t to say Vancouver is a cultural backwater. But it exists galaxies away from the Londons and New Yorks and L.A.s and even smaller cultural centres like Dallas or Chicago or Boston.
In hiring Herzog & de Meuron, a name that was meant to impress and yet wouldn’t have meant anything to 99.9 per cent of its population, Vancouver was the retail clerk who spends her savings on a Prada purse, which she safeguards in the basement apartment that she rents.
The VAG board has promised to come up with a new design that works. Mr. Rennie remains skeptical.
“If this project was tone deaf in 2012, it’s really tone deaf now,” he said. “The money is just not there and it’s time they face that reality.”