ABOVE: Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004), the centrepiece of “SBC Plaza” in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Boeing announced that they’re piling into the corporate stroke-monument known as Millennium Park in Chicago with a new $5-million donation to build two new outdoor exhibition spaces yesterday. Millennium Park, which is an interconnected series of plazas, fields, and gardens built on reclaimed rail lands in the windy city, is a bonechilling glimpse of the future of public artistic expression, as most of the park consists of heavily-sponsored and branded enclaves whose development is bankrolled by private enterprise: you can walk along “Chase Promenade” (paid for by the Bank One Foundation), linger in “SBC Plaza” with its centrepiece Anish Kapoor sculpture (the sculpture actually looks fascinating), or sit in “Wrigley Square,” at the corner of Michigan Ave. and Randolph St.

Boeing deserves our thanks, naturally, for spending its money on important artistic projects like public sculpture, but the whole scenario of Millennium Park (it must have seemed like a great name when they started buildling in 1998) is disturbing in its implications for public development of communal spaces and the artworks that fill them. Chicago has essentially outsourced its mandate to govern municipal spaces to multinationals with deeper pockets. Art has always relied on patrons, but the extent and scope of corporate namedropping going on in Millennium Park is a little offputting.

Then again, advertising is the art form of the 21st century, so let’s all throw our hands up in despair and have a refreshing ice cream beside the “Exelon Pavilions,” generously sponsored by the ominously-named Exelon Corp. Boeing is joining some good company.

Boeing to Fund Open-air Gallery Spaces in Chicago’s Millennium Park