In the Vancouver, B.C., weekly paper The Georgia Straight, Janet Smith responds to my recent piece about Vancouverism.

There was a time, in the ’90s, I remember being blown away by a show at the Seattle Art Museum that made this Vancouverite green with envy. In one series of huge rooms, you could walk through a Dale Chihuly installation that found otherworldly glass forms blooming out of the floors or stabbing down from the ceilings; in another, Mary Ellen Mark black-and-white documentary photos of Indian circus performers and homeless teens haunted me for months. Across town, the Henry was showing some equally exciting photo art. Chihuly is a mainstream, commercial name now, but Seattle felt like it had a scene happening at that time. And nowhere was that more obvious than in its public art—an area that, it might make residents of the Emerald City feel better to know—which still seems engage and excite people more than many of the blend-into-the-environment pieces we have here.

Smith provides a link to a 1999 piece she wrote praising Seattle's public art compared to Vancouver's. Now she asks whether Seattle's public art program is still the city's strong suit in art.

My first instinct is to say no, and in a quick memory scan I'm finding it difficult to think of truly terrific public works made in the last 10 years.

(Only one beef: Smith, and Translinguistic Other before her, both attribute my admiration for the Vancouver scene largely to some unadulterated love for the current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, How Soon Is Now. What I actually said about that show is that it has plenty of brilliant works, but also some total duds. My Vancouver observations are based on years of looking, not on a single show.)