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Attention visual artists. Calls for proposals go out this fall for the public art planned for the new Southeast False Creek neighbourhood, which encompasses roughly the land between Cambie and Main streets north of First Avenue. That's $4-million worth of work, according to Public Art Program manager Bryan Newson.

Just make sure you don't bid without reading the Southeast False Creek Art Master Plan, however. Published in the spring and now available on the city's website, the report lays out in precise detail the themes that this public art should express.

Since the art will be a permanent part of the neighbourhood after the temporary Olympic athletes village is sold as market housing post-2010, this is a pretty important document.

I'm a novelist, so I have no financial stake in all this. The day is still to come when developers are required to commission writers to tell stories about their condo towers.

But I still took curious note of the master plan. Public art via development is an intriguing business. The work is paradoxically invisible, given that it tends to land in areas of extremely high traffic: foyers and breezeways, roundabouts and seawall bull-noses.

I must confess I ate lunch sitting on Daniel Laskarin's Working Landscape for several years before I figured out what it was. (Look for it in the greenway connecting Hastings Street to Cordova Street in the 900 block.) This was actually a city-commissioned piece, made up of planters on large circular platforms. Maybe I'd have noticed sooner if they were turning as the artist intended.

Even when I really see a piece though, public art remains to me a strange hybrid of the creative and bureaucratic impulses. Given the breath of life by urban planners, the work is often smudged with the fingerprints of official message.

In Vancouver since the late 1990s, this has taken the form of a didactic murmur on the topic of the city's now almost entirely forgotten industrial past.

Look in False Creek at the foot of Davie Street for Welcome to the Land of Light (Henry Tsang, 1997), which references the extinct Chinook trading language. Or The Lookout (Noel Best and Christos Dikeakos, 1999), which draws attention to the sawmill industry that once filled the creek. Or even Street Light (Bernie Miller and Alan Tregebov, 1997), which incorporates a range of images from False Creek's history in a structure that, assuming there's sun, projects these down as shadows onto the street at noon on the date that the depicted events occurred.

But Concorde Pacific Place isn't the only outfit paying for this kind of thing. In Coal Harbour, just north of the area's community centre, you'll find both LightShed (Liz Magor, 2004) and Weave (Douglas Senft, 2002). Here are recollections of the old vernacular architecture that used to line that shore and, more surprising, an homage paid to our much maligned timber-felling industry.

On one level, I respond to this historical reflection. We're a young town, an immigrant town. Most of us come from other places. (I was born in Venezuela.) Communities like ours should pause once in a while to consider the history that has grown locally.

Still, it's hard to avoid the sense that there is a guilty conscience played out here, too: a ghosted image of a sawmill; a concrete column with enormous tree rings on it; a bench with an etched First Nations word; all these in the shadow of enormous towers, many of which have hardly a light on at night. Are these history lessons or mumbled apologies?

The plans for Southeast False Creek seem alive to this ambiguity and so embrace a wider time frame. "The larger story," the authors write, "is one of the site's past, our current value system, and a sustainable future - a continuum of people and place."

I admire the idea, although I find it impossible to imagine a more difficult creative environment. I'm back to thinking about the novelist in this position.

"It's a novel referencing the rail, shipping and foundry industries," I'd be telling people at parties. "But also ecological innovation, team diversity, neighbourhood dynamism, water experience and park integration."

I won't ever be called on to say this, of course. But visual artists might, as those are precisely the themes laid out in the master plan.

They're also precisely the themes that will message the streetscape of Southeast False Creek until someone finally loses patience in a half-century or two. And it's hard to predict how those moments play out.

I offer the Second Beach seal as a tragic example. Here's a piece of Vancouver public art dating back to my childhood: a painted concrete seal that stood at the Second Beach swimming pool balancing a brightly painted ball on her nose.

Some years back, animal rights activists, sensitive to "the current value system" no doubt, petitioned that the ball be removed. Incredibly, a spineless Vancouver Parks Board caved. The ball now sits, ignored and filthy, at the top of a pole emerging from the roof of the English Bay Café.

The seal remains at her post. Eyes cast pointlessly skywards, a resigned, weary expression having settled on her face. She seems to be demanding of the passerby: Remind me what I was supposed to be doing here?

All art arising from master plans will pose this question eventually, of course. Some will have an easier time answering it than others.

Timothy Taylor is a novelist

and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel Story House.

ttaylor@globeandmail.com