If you're downtown this Friday, chances are you will notice people painting 24 fire hydrants between Public and Playhouse Squares. This project is the first in a series of events planned to showcase downtown art and culture. The hydrant project - titled "Cleveland's on Fire" - is being billed as a public art exhibition. Last month, organizers of the series (including the Downtown Merchants Association, the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, and the City of Cleveland) held a press conference, which featured an awkward display of 80 proposed hydrant designs (painted on two-dimensional cut-outs that were propped up in flower pots). Several hyper-enthusiastic people spoke, each one of them referring to the anticipated hydrants as "art." Based on the designs, the painted hydrants are, at best, decoration; at worst, they are ill-conceived urban lawn ornaments. I suppressed my sighs and eye rolls as Lee Hill of the Downtown Cleveland Partnership, and Tim Mueller, the City's Chief Development Officer, bestowed the artistic merits of the hydrants -after all, what do they know about art? But when Tom Schorgl, President and CEO of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, told the crowd of reporters that the artists who created the hydrant designs were "branding our downtown," my jaw nearly hit the pavement. Schorgl, in case you don't know, is our city and foundation-appointed arts advocate. For the past several years he's conducted extensive research on Greater Cleveland's cultural community. Recently, he's been pounding the pavement trying to get public sector funding for the arts on the November ballot. How could he believe that the lawn ornaments epitomize Cleveland and it's art community? Did his exhaustive research reveal that Clevelanders equate art with fire hydrants painted to look like firemen, cats with sunglasses, or guitar-playing fish?

If Cleveland wants a vital art community, our leaders need to stop glorifying lame efforts like "Cleveland's on Fire," and start noticing - and promoting - the smart and innovative projects that are being initiated by bona fide members of our creative class. Schorgl should be speaking at Nimbis Gallery, or the Glass Bubble Project, or at GROOP in the AR Tcade?. These brilliant enterprises were started by entrepreneurial people who have made things happen on their own, with their own hard-earned cash, and without corporate funding, or public support. Even if the hydrants were the most brilliant works of art ever created, we all know what happens to fire hydrants - dogs piss on them. I thought the idea was to move art out of the gutter, and use it as a way to bolster our city's economy and innovative potential. From Cool Cleveland contributor Lyz Bly (:divend:)