Art as a symbol ... of Port waste

Is art still art if you can't actually see it?

That puzzler pops into my head as I squint through barbed wire, trying to make out one of the newer works in the region's booming public-art collection. In the distance, obscured by trees, are what look to be images of puffins etched on a concrete wall. Or are they ... mermaids?

Our photographer says they look like pigeons to him.

A man having his car detailed nearby takes a look.

"That's art?" he asks, shading his eyes like a ship captain scanning the horizon.

I don't know. The nearest I get to it is 150 yards. Separating me from the art is a "mitigation area" — a swath of woods and security fences with signs promising federal prosecution if you try to get closer.

The security isn't for the art. It's because the art is attached to a 130-foot retaining wall built for the new third runway at Sea-Tac.

"Warning. This facility is used in FAA air traffic control. Loss of human life may result from service interruption," reads a sign on the fence.

Isn't public art supposed to be more, well, public?

The etchings that look like puffins are on the airport's west side, near Des Moines Memorial Drive South. The only people who might see it clearly without binoculars are workers at the Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility.

More wall art, a bit easier to see, is on the airport's north side, near Highway 518.

The cost to taxpayers of all this is as much of an enigma as the art itself.

The Port of Seattle, which runs the airport, "has no idea what the amount invested was," said a recent state audit.

The art was budgeted for $257,000. But according to the audit, a Port manager said it cost $1 million.

Asked by auditors to document the actual cost, the Port couldn't. The Port doesn't know, said the manager. That's because — and here's my favorite part — "we don't want to know."

The Port didn't want to know the real cost of its own project because it was using the $1 million figure to "sell the 3rd Runway to the public," alleges the audit.

What's more, if it turned out the Port had spent less than $1 million, it would be obligated to "pony up" more money for art, the manager said. Whether there was any place to put the art or not.

This little tale — about art you can't see for a price you can't know — is but a blip in a larger investigation of waste and wrongdoing at the Port. It's so little it never gets mentioned next to all those hints of fraud and cooked contracts.

Yet it says a lot about how big government projects are done these days. Especially at the Port.

To build anything objectionable, you have to bribe neighbors with taxpayer-funded pork. You have to spin and cut corners or you won't get anything done.

That's why King County, for example, plans to spend $140 million on parks, sidewalks, paths and landscaping around its new Brightwater sewage-treatment plant. More than $4 million of that is for art.

Art at a sewage plant? The good news is at least you'll be able to see it if you visit.

Now, when I have criticized public art in the past, some artists have called me an ignorant, uncultured rube. So let me be clear: I am not critiquing this art. I can't because I can't see it.

But I do want to say: Can government and the public-arts community please stop doing things like this?

Having art scattered around the region makes it a richer place. I even like those much-maligned Sound Transit salmon on the I-90 overpass near Eastgate in Bellevue. As you drive by, you glimpse them just for an instant — like a silvery flash of fish migrating in a stream.

But art on embankments behind barbed wire in a no-man's zone?

It's a symbol of pork. Of art reduced to bureaucratic adornment. Of a government heedless of the bottom line.

I mean it would symbolize all that. If you could see it.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.