The Great Debate

   Several weeks ago, we expressed our opposition —on several grounds —to the placement of a sculpture, Solar Web, on the South Beach. 
At the time, we invited Bruria Finkel, a former Arts Commissioner and most eloquent advocate of Solar Web, to make the case for Solar Web.    She accepted our invitation. Her statement appears on page 6 of this edition, along with some drawings she submitted. 
   The debate over Solar Web has raged, remarkably, from the moment the sculpture was announced about 15 years ago and it has, if anything, got hotter and more divisive as time has passed. It has also got more complex. 
   As we recall, the first and most passionate opponents of Solar Web 
were people who love the beach as it is, unencumbered. The people who oppose it on safety or cost grounds rang in later. But perhaps we remember it that way because we count ourselves among the beach people. 
   We have no idea how this seemingly endless debate will end. The Rec and Parks Commission has now voted 5 to 1 to recommend 
that the City Council reject the sculpture, but the Council may over-ride or ignore the Commission’s recommendation. And, given the 
way the bureaucracy works, whatever the Council does may be subject to further action. 
   If, at this uncertain juncture, there is anything to be learned from all this, it is that the City, meaning City Hall, the bureaucracy, and the city, meaning residents, have profoundly different views of the beach. 
   In the view of many residents, the beach is the primary fact of Santa Monica, the axis on which everything turns. In the view of the City, 
the beach is a resource to be manipulated in the service of some larger scheme. Indeed, the beach has been officially described as “a visitor-serving facility.” 
   Since these views are at fundamental odds with each other, they are bound to trigger disputes, or battles, every time the City, in its own vernacular, sets about to “enhance” the beach. The fervent beach partisans are not gong to give up and they are not going away and so the City policy-makers would be well-advised to listen less to their marketeers and consultants and more to the ocean, look less at charts and reports and more at the beach and perhaps even actually spend some time on the sand.