ART COMMENTARY : Wish List for Arts in New Year : Hopes: Topping the list is a wish that officials show more sensitivity in dealing with public art proposals.

The old year has gone, and with it the obligatory look backward at the the local art scene’s high and low points. Today, the threshold of the new year, is the time to look ahead and dream. The following is my list of hopes for the new year--ones that, if realized, will make 1992 a healthier, more vibrant year for the arts:

That the City Council will exercise more courage and sensitivity in the future when voting on gifts of art to the city. The recent acceptance of a monstrously oversized, offensive bronze statue of the Spanish explorer Balboa brought out the worst in the council and in its process of accepting works of art.

Before its December vote approving the Balboa statue for a site in Balboa Park, the council heard testimony from numerous scholars and arts professionals describing the 16th century Spaniard’s legacy of terror and genocide. Most council members, however, chose to ignore the lessons of history and instead to play the game of politics, fawning over the work’s donors, Elizabeth and Gaye North, and engaging them in a courtship dance, dollar signs gleaming in their eyes.

The likelihood that the statue would offend many of their constituents seemed to matter little to the council members, with the exceptions of newcomers George Stevens and Valerie Stallings. Nor did it make a difference that the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture had recommended against siting the work in such a visible, public locale. The council needs to listen better, to sense and not just to dollars, and to grant the arts commission real power--not just advisory status--on such matters.

A hope that the African American Museum of Fine Arts will find a permanent home and a solid direction. For the past two years, the organization has staged sporadic exhibitions, most of them in the lobby of the Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza. Though the space is centrally located and publicly accessible, the museum remains relatively invisible to the community at large. For the fledgling organization to develop a consistent, museum-quality program of exhibitions and events, it needs a year-round home of its own. Downtown developers, take note.

A hope that the San Diego Unified Port District will awaken from its long, lazy hibernation and begin to regard its art budget--now nearly $3 million and growing--as a golden opportunity rather than a cumbersome chore. Consultants Carol and Thomas Hobson were hired last year to develop a public art master plan for spending the money, which accrues annually as a percentage of the port’s revenues.

Their plan has been submitted and is now under review by port commissioners, who expect to take action on it early this year. Let’s hope that the plan provides some aggressive and concrete guidelines for moving the port’s art program forward and avoiding the embarrassing pitfalls it suffered in the past.

A hope that a funding angel will rescue Young at Art from total dissolution and grant the popular arts education program longer life. Initially funded in 1988 by a $2.75 million gift from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation, the program nearly ended this year when its seed money ran out. Muriel Gluck came through again at the last minute with enough funds to keep part of the program going for half of the current school year, but Young at Art’s future looks bleak.

Since the budget cuts of Proposition 13 over a decade ago, schoolchildren have been starved of arts education, and Young at Art has been a nourishing supplement, bringing artists to the schools and students to the San Diego Museum of Art. It’s a temporary program, and it should be, since an ongoing, integrated arts curriculum would better serve students in the long run, but until the resources are allotted for such a broad, curricular change, programs like Young at Art should be supported with the same kind of passion they engender in the students they reach.

A hope that the “tax window” benefiting donors of valuable objects will be made permanent, and not eliminated after the first half of 1992, as scheduled. Gifts of art have poured into museums since the temporary change in the federal tax law was enacted, allowing donors to deduct the full market value of donated objects. Such deductions were eliminated in 1986 by the passage of the Tax Reform Act, and gifts to museums dropped immediately from a steady flow to a sickly trickle.

Legislators will be considering the permanent reinstatement of full market value deductions later this month. With government support of the arts under continuing threat, the private sector needs all the incentives it can get to bolster the nation’s cultural life. Opening the tax window permanently would provide just such an incentive.

A hope that San Diego’s art galleries will make it through another year, braving both the feeble national economy and the more constant challenge of local neglect. Art collectors in San Diego, what few there are, often shop elsewhere for lack of trust in home-grown dealers and artists. Perhaps as this year progresses and the local art scene inches its way closer to maturity and credibility, dealers, artists and others in the arts will start to flourish, and not just survive.