Art for whose sake? One cultural mandarin's take on the politics of funding.
Jennings, Sarah
No Culture, No Future
Simon Brault
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Cormorant Books
171 pages, softcover
ISBN 9781897151761
If the arts and culture need advocates, there is no more tireless one than Simon Brault. Trained as a chartered accountant but a longtime arts administrator, Brault has worked at Montreal's National Theatre School since 1981 and was made its CEO in 2008. He is also in his second term as vice-chair of the Canada Council for the Arts. Along the way to these prestigious appointments, he has developed and honed his strongly held views about the arts and last year published them in French in Le facteur C, a book of essays, now translated into English. Its central thesis deals with Brault's take on his experiences in the arts field and "a plea in favour of action to return cultural concerns to the forefront of public policy." When first published, it caused widespread interest in Quebec, catching the eye of the media and the attention of leading cultural bureaucrats at both the provincial and federal levels; Brault is well known for being able to attract the ear of the most senior officials. He would like now to extend the debate to the rest of Canada. And he pins the discussion on the current widely held view that arts and culture can play a pivotal role in the development of our civic life, most of which is located in urban settings where the majority of Canadians live. In short, he buys fully into the idea of "creative cities"--cultural metropolises--that has become so popular as a result of the work of a number of contemporary thinkers, including Richard Florida, with whom Brault worked on a Montreal study in 2004.
Much of what Brault writes reads like old wine in new bottles. He has jumped firmly on the bandwagon that claims if the arts and culture are firmly implanted at the core of public policy as a properly funded tool to regenerate and develop our cities and to engage our multicultural populations, then the long-sought dream of the full "democratization" of the arts will be achieved. He recounts his own adventures in his beloved city of Montreal toward this goal. Whether the long and patient years that he describes have achieved the objective is unclear, but there has been significant progress. The aim to transfer those Montreal experiences to other cities across the country is an endeavour that Brault has undertaken, lecturing widely on the ideas contained in his book and using his position as Canada Council vice-chair. One of the more popular ideas he worked on in Quebec, Journees de la culture, a province-wide annual weekend of cultural celebration, is now to be repeated across Canada starting in September 2010.
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Certainly, Brault's place in the higher echelons of cultural administration gives him access to the best information, and there is oodles of it in this book. He sets out a wide array of details about arts funding in Canada, which the reader can count as reliable, given the source. There are some useful facts, although many have been heard before: Quebec's expenses per capita for culture are three times those spent in British Columbia; 64 percent of all direct cultural jobs from a national total of 609,000 (according to Statistics Canada) are concentrated in the large metropolitan regions of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver; culture contributes 1.1 million paid secondary jobs to the Canadian economy with another 729,000 cultural sector volunteers added on to that number; public libraries receive 71.5 percent of all municipal culture expenditures; in 2008 Cirque du Soleil paid out $35.4 million on residual rights, with 56 percent going to Quebec designers and 1 percent to designers living elsewhere in Canada; an arts organization which spends $250,000 in a small or mid-size city creates an average of 7.5 jobs locally. That last figure makes an interesting contrast with the cost of approximately $2 million of public money per worker spent on the recent effort to save Canada's auto industry.
Brault does not flinch from the economic arguments used for supporting culture. Indeed he has learned to like them. His essay carefully parses for us where the $84.6 billion in funding that he identifies from all three levels of government is going. But he wants to cast the debate in a far broader, more citizen-based social context. And in this he harks back to the two basic threads that have informed Canadian culture policy since the 1960s and shows himself as someone aware of their entanglement.
Brault makes reference to the post-war thought that emanated from the two major European victors, England and France. In the war's aftermath, leaders in both countries had strong and similar views about democratizing the arts to make them more accessible to the general public.
In Britain, cultural leaders, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, were instrumental in starting up the Arts Council of Great Britain, restoring Covent Garden and introducing other initiatives with the intention of making the arts more available to the wide populace. They saw themselves as liberal elites and wanted to raise the awareness of the so-called masses to enjoy the levels of excellence that they believed in. They were not interested in direct control by the state with its concomitant political overtones, and the practice of the arts, through organizations like the Arts Council, was conducted at arm's length from the government.
(The damage that supposed elites inflict is soundly thumped several times in this book by a writer for whom any form of elitism is unacceptable. In this, Brault diverges from the thinking of such contemporary intellectuals as the British-trained, left-wing Jewish historian Tony Judt, who, in writing about the work of Keynes, has said Keynes "grasped the importance of bringing first-class art, performance and writing to the broadest possible audience if British society were to overcome its paralyzing divisions," and adds that "there is nothing patronizing" in the approach nor in "the meritocracy of opening up elite institutions to mass applicants at public expense.")
In France, on the other hand, socialist post-war leaders, including the writer, thinker and politician Andre Malraux, believed that the arts should be run by the state and brought to the people through locally created Maisons de la Culture. (Of course institutions like that guardian of French cultural history, the Comedie Frangaise, were to be maintained, also paid for by the state). This approach placed artists in local communities where the arts were to be created "of, for and by the people." Issues of excellence in new work were of secondary importance. Citizen involvement was the key. And the whole matter should be controlled by government.
Up until the 1 960s, mo st of Canada's cultural organizations had been cast along British lines, that is to say on the arm's-length principle. Those organizations, which included the Canada Council, the CBC and the National Arts Centre as well as other Crown corporations, received their budgets on a regular basis with little interference from the minister of the day or his or her officials.
With the arrival on the scene of Gerard Pelletier in 1968 as the minister responsible for culture in Pierre Trudeau's Cabinet, a sea change began. Pelletier's ideas were steeped in the French approach and he took the democratization and decentralization of arts and culture as the touchstone of his policies, although these were to be overseen from the centre by an overarching federal cultural policy devised and controlled by his ministry. Pelletier's principles were profoundly affected by the burgeoning independence movement in Quebec, and many changes occurred such as the transfer of educational television to the provinces. Funds also began to bypass the federal cultural agencies and be put directly into the regions. For example, the Opportunities for Youth program, designed to help unemployment in the regions, funded a large number of arts projects but--and this was noteworthy--many of the grants went to non-professionals and without the arm's-length peer review of a Canada Council.
By and large Pelletier's views, 40 years on, have come to dominate. Still, no federal ministry of culture (at least in name) has yet been created for Canada, although there is one in the province of Quebec and also latterly in Alberta. The overall effect has been a much greater politicization of the granting of public funds at all levels of government, where applications are now sieved and strained not only for their artistic benefits, but for all their economic, commercial and especially political advantages as well.
Despite being the vice-chair of perhaps the most arm's-length agency in the federal stable, Brault clearly embraces the Pelletier approach, which has won out in the practice of cultural policy in Canada, although some arm's-length agencies, such as the Canada Council, persist. Brault does not dwell on the implications of this in his pursuit of a fully citizen-based engagement in the arts.
For those who, by the way, have always wondered how Quebec got so far out ahead of the parade when it comes to its generous support of culture and its successes vis-a-vis the rest of Canada, Brault is equally generous in pointing out how the province has benefited from both schools of thought when it comes to cultural support. While indicating that Quebec cultural policy has been largely inspired by the French model and the thinking of Malraux, allowing for a cultural policy "in line with national, linguistic, identity-based, and civic concerns," he also acknowledges the federal position and its historically institutionalized "healthy suspicion for political involvement in assistance to culture" He points out that "in Quebec, the complementary and sometimes contradictory forces between the two founding approaches of government-supported cultural development ... often allowed leaders in the cultural community to enjoy the best of both worlds." Indeed, Brault argues, this dual approach has "encouraged progressive hybridization of cultural policies and instruments in Canada."
Brault's interest in society-wide citizen engagement is interestingly demonstrated in part three of his book, which cites Montreal as a case study for other cities in how to turn themselves into cultural metropolises with all the storied advantages that this is supposed to provide. The exhaustive account of his years spent in the trenches starts with the restoration of the Monument-National, a building that houses the National Theatre School and is located in one of the oldest and most dilapidated parts of the city. This project expanded from just a school and became a more "open cultural complex where training, production and presentation of the performing arts coexisted," intended to serve smaller and mostly impoverished professional theatre companies as well. It is his work on this project that started Brault down the track to becoming a full-blown cultural activist. His role in mobilizing opinion, developing critical ideas, making connections and participating in public colloques and more public meetings than the reader can keep track of, also led to the founding of an organization, Culture Montreal, in the drive to place art and culture at the heart of civic policy--a move suddenly hampered by the decision to amalgamate Montreal's 23 boroughs. It is a tale of someone not only of immense tenacity and ambition but for whom the process and procedures themselves are infinitely fascinating. It is ironic, then, that when the chips were down and it was time to anoint Montreal with one of its biggest achievements in the cultural sector, the creation of Rendez-vous novembre 2007: Montreal, Cultural Metropolis, with all the attendant benefits and action plans for the future, it was a steering committee of five powerful people--including a federal and two provincial Cabinet ministers, each politically responsible for the Montreal region, and indeed Brault himself who was in the chair--that settled the funding that allowed the event to proceed. Nevertheless, the political, economic and commercial as well as artistic and cultural representation that finally gathered to set an action plan through to Canada's 150th anniversary in 2017, was, in Brault's opinion, unique and exemplary in the recent annals of cultural planning. Brault's aim in telling the tale is to encourage other cities and political jurisdictions to mount similar efforts. Others outside Quebec may argue that there is not that much new in the development processes he is describing, but he is to be commended for wishing to enlarge the discussion.
Two aspects of the debate are absent or just lightly touched on in this text. One is the issue of the lack of arts education in schools and therefore the manner in which early exposure to the arts and creativity shapes the future. Second, while architects, urban planners and others connected to the shape and appearance of our cities seem party to the debate, there is little reference to the density of cities and the deleterious effects of suburbia that have drawn vitality away from the urban cores that these new-found ideas seek to reinvigorate. When our early cultural leaders, such as ballet's Celia Franca and Ludmilla Chiriaeff or opera's Herman Geiger-Torel, were founding some of our greatest artistic organizations, they were working with little or no subsidy and also in much denser and less spread-out cities.
While surely long reflected, this book appears to have been written quickly and, similarly, translated with haste to get it to the English market. The clarity of its message, at least in English, would have benefited from more stringent editing. Awkwardness of language, perhaps stemming from the original French, at times renders some of its thoughts difficult to follow. There is no index, but the endnotes are interesting, full of information and well worth scanning.
There are insufficient books written on the practice of the arts and culture in Canada, so this one should be welcomed to the small stream that is now trickling along. While cultural aficionados will certainly want to read No Culture, No Future, it will be less appealing to a general audience that needs so urgently to hear its message and its challenge: how to ensure that arts and culture are an intrinsic and indivisible part of our civil society and can contribute to the creativity in every citizen.
Sarah Jennings is a national arts journalist and the author of Art and Politics--The History of the National Arts Centre (Dundurn, 2009).
