More thoughtful, popular arts building plans needed

It's good to see that Marilynn Webb, a distinguished senior artist in our midst, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Otago, acknowledging her achievement as an artist and also as an art teacher.

The latter is a difficult role. You can't teach people to be creative and the history books are full of tales of great practitioners who never went to art school or who did and dropped out because they found the process stifling.

I don't buy into the theory that art schools crush creative talent. Your true creative will always find a way to flourish. But it's certainly true that a lot of what happens in art schools is not particularly productive.

For that reason I was happy to attend Prof Leoni Schmidt's public address because she is the head of our art school, which is productive, and the institution has been under attack.

The address was serious but the occasion light-hearted because the power went off in the middle. Prof Schmidt took it in her stride and soon resumed her address, which was upbeat.

She described the operation of the school and her own objectives and informed us an endowment fund is being established.

This is good because our school teaches hands-on practices, such as the print-making long conducted by Marilynn Webb, which is expensive compared with book-based teaching, but invaluable for people wishing to facilitate their self-expression.

It is this which makes our school expensive to run but it's also what makes it exceptional. Most of the other New Zealand schools are book-bound. While they are cheaper to operate I think they are not so helpful to aspiring artists.

The Dunedin school's record speaks for itself. But its administrators in the Otago Polytechnic have been trying to save money and decided to disestablish jobs.

It wasn't very smart and Prof Schmidt was too diplomatic to say so. But an endowment fund is a way to make it up. I hope it attracts plenty of dollars.

The polytechnic has also announced a capital plan which envisages demolishing the old buildings the art school uses on the corner of Albany St and Anzac Ave. One wonders if any of the people involved in that decision know what the buildings are, or were.

By contrast the university's Options for Future Campus Development shows a much greater awareness of the built environment. In an article the other day I mentioned its obvious practical oversight - the elimination of a through-traffic corridor - but it shows a greater understanding of the existing cityscape and its values.