This year marked the beginning of a new century, a new millennium, and perhaps a whole new approach to the public funding of the arts in Canada.

It was the year in which Heritage Canada set up a special Millennium Fund for public art. It was a one-time only spending bonanza of $160 million, and the results were impressive.

A cockeyed optimist like me can only hope that all of us enjoyed the results, saw the benefits, and will demand that the feds do this each and every year in the future. After all, they promised this would be "the dawn of a new era."

The first hint of new things to come was in how the government ponied up the dough. The grants were distributed in a less bureaucratic fashion than the typical doling out of funds. This is probably because the Millennium Fund was new and devoid of the bad history that tends to build up in other cultural agencies like Telefilm and the Canada Council.

Over the past year in the Compuserve Canadian Arts & Culture forum, we've covered some of the triumphs of the Millennium fund. I was especially pleased to do a start-to-finish story on Toronto artist Laurie McGugan's Circle of Trees. Laurie was so enthralled by the process of public art that she's currently thinking about throwing her hat into a number of public art competitions. For Laurie, the joy of the discipline is that "it's part of the environment and the everyday life of a lot of people."

So it seems that artists want to free art from the hands of a privileged few, into the mighty maw of the many. It also appears that governmental funding agencies are encouraging public art and competitions. So what does this mean? What did they spend the money on? And what the heck is public art anyway?

What is Public Art? The term "public art" was born in the 1960s. This was a time when people started to shift from the idea that sculpture was the only kind of acceptable "open air" art and embrace more radical concepts like video installations, evocative billboarding and the like. Works were commissioned specifically for urban spaces, with artists considering the essential elements and characteristics of the individual city when they were creating their work.

It also happened to coincide with the dawn of the Trudeau era, and of big government spending. But that initial burst of funding helped keep alive a Canadian culture that was threatened for the first time, in a serious way, by television signals beaming in from the United States.

Now, in this new era, the threat looms larger -- not just with signals from the U.S., but by the entire shift to globalized corporate culture. I can see a distinct political need for increased funding to the public arts. And it's the kind of funding that feeds back into the economy. Pay your artists -- the people who keep our stories alive -- and they will buy airline tickets, broadcast equipment, publicists, and anything else they need to tell the Canadian story to the rest of the world.

The other great thing about the Millennium Fund is that until now, public art has been perceived as an urban phenomenon. But the Year 2000 outreach put public art into the squares of small towns and rural areas, spreading the cultural benefits even further than we would have previously thought possible. The big story in public art isn't Toronto's highly questionable "Moose on the Loose" project. In fact the real art sprang up elsewhere. Here's just a sampling of what went on in the public art domain Year 2000.