On of my favourite cultural writers, Russell Smith at the Globe, has penned (typed?) an essay that ties the rise of Halifax’s status as a city to the very presence of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in its soul. As a teenager in the 1970s, he remembers sneaking into bars to watch art school punk bands drone noise out of decorated guitars, and sitting in the studios of the students of the conceptualists, who’d paint “layers of paint onto a ball until it was a giant amorphous blob.” Smith does not see these seemingly unproductive activities as evidence of the low value of art, though.

Rather, he makes a case for keeping art around, in its purest form, even if we don’t understand it. Romance is not to be understood, after all, but experienced.

“And then there were the girls in those fragrant studios. One had a crew cut and a matronly (creepy) streak and used to let us teenagers hang around her cold apartment and fall in love with her and look out into the fog over the harbour. She wrote her poems on the fridge. This was an education in romance of every kind for a square city. Art schools are more than cryptic videos in white-walled galleries: They are electrifying spokes connected to everything around them.”

Of course, Russell isn’t the first to make this argument. And in order to formulate his points, he does have to gloss over the day-to-day of the financial decisions inside an educational system that must choose between art funding and funding for other things. But without the fertilizing, “humming triangle of life” formed by NSCAD, Neptune Theatre and the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, he argues Halifax “wouldn’t have been a city at all.”