Auckland’s mayor might not see the point of the city’s art gallery, but he’d find plenty to admire about the parking building across the road.

Yesterday I parked in a car parking building right across the road from Auckland Art Gallery. I got out of my car, went downstairs to try a sandwich I had been highly recommended for a treat, and came back to my car about 35 minutes later. The sandwich, as it turned out, was really good. (Thanks, Swings.)

The parking, however, cost me $13.50. And as I thought about that and regretted my decision to park there, I realised something on the ground floor where I paid my $13.50 was emitting a high pitch frequency that was giving me an instant headache. It might have been some kind of mechanical fault, or it may have been an attempt to stop homeless people congregating there, but either way the noise and the dark, dank atmosphere was giving me clear signs to leave as fast as I could.

So I caught the lift, which was covered in graffiti and smelt like piss, back up to the 12th floor to find my car, and as I did I thought “Wow, what a hostile space. What an unwelcoming, unpleasant, anti-social shitsmear of a building”. Then I drove my car back down the 12 floors and looked at all the cars parked there and thought about how much money this terrible place must make.

Another thing that happened yesterday was that Auckland mayor Wayne Brown pondered wildly and publicly about the utility and purpose of the building across the road – the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. He looked at the number of visitors between July and September (9,516), and the number of staff (122) and wondered what the point of it all was. “9,500 wouldn’t run a dairy in terms of turnover,” he said. ”How do we get to have 122 people looking after a few paintings in a building that nobody goes to?”

Brave council members tried to point out the gallery’s value might be broader than just gate takings, but Brown wasn’t having that. “We’ve got billions of dollars of value in the cellar that no one is looking at – do we have to own all that? They are not New Zealand pictures,” he said, being an actual mayor of an actual city, with a straight face.

He’s been elected, of course, on a platform of “fixing Auckland”. It’s unclear if the problem he wants to fix is specifically clearing up the council’s debts and spending, or a more broadly post-kindness era sense of getting rid of perceived wishy-washy nonsense, a sort of vague handwavey snarl at “these days” in general. The approach has been blunt to say the least – a heavy hammer swung at all ill-defined target, assuming the worst about every aspect of council operation before learning what it is they actually do. He wants to smash something. Exactly what seems irrelevant.

But this blinkered focus on cutting costs before anything else misses the big picture about why the council does the things it does in the first place. What are institutions for if there’s no value in anything past dollars on the budget sheet. By Wayne Brown’s measures, that horrible piss soaked rip-off carpark is the more successful building.

It’s hard to believe the selfishness, the short sightedness, the ignorance that leads to thinking that “I don’t go there” means “no one goes there”, or “doesn’t appeal to me” means “we don’t need it”. Auckland Art Gallery isn’t perfect; they’ve faced big internal challenges in recent times, but they’ve had triumphs too – just look at 2020’s landmark survey of contemporary Māori art, Toi Tū Toi Ora, which pulled huge audience numbers and made bold statements for the history books about the past, present and future of Māori art. Some of the impacts of a show like that are immediate, changing careers and perceptions. Others will be seeds that are planted now that might take 10 or 20 years to flower. Somewhere out there is a kid who saw that show who in 2037 will create an artwork that redefines us all again.

And this doesn’t just apply to art galleries – it’s parks, museums, public art and libraries, things that bring a city to life. Cities are places to feel at home in, to grow up in and feel safe and inspired and make a life in, and institutions like the gallery give us that in a way that will never be reflected in visitor numbers or lines on a budget sheet.

So sure, cut the budget. But if you don’t like the gallery and you’re purely judging usefulness on running costs and profitability you can always go and admire the ear-splitting, stinking car storage facility next door. They’re not struggling for visitor numbers, and they like money too.