Lost Opportunity?

National Cultural Summit gives the visual arts short shrift.

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The stated intent of last week’s National Culture Summit: The Future of Arts, Culture and Heritage in Canada was to mobilize positive economic and social outcomes and discuss post-pandemic recovery, long-term growth and competitiveness. Organized by Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, the Ottawa summit built on earlier groundwork sessions with stakeholders. But, somehow, too much had fallen by the wayside when the summit got underway at the National Arts Centre. It focused largely on digital transformation and, while other issues were discussed, the performing arts dominated the spotlight. 

Where were the voices of the visual arts sector? The National Gallery of Canada, a legislated instrument of culture, was conspicuous by its absence from the stage. Interventions had to be made to enable other members of the visual arts sector to attend. In disbelief, one visual arts leader remarked: “Are we potted plants?” A missive highlighting the issue was sent to Rodriguez on the summit’s first day. 

Did the summit achieve what it set out to accomplish? Kate Taylor, the visual arts critic at the Globe and Mail, says Rodriguez misread the audience. “The question in Ottawa this week is whether visual artists, theatre performers or museum administrators are really the best people to be advocating for some much-needed Internet regulation,” she wrote.

The issues now facing the cultural sector are varied and complex, far exceeding the scope of this commentary. But the misreading of priorities across multiple sectors stood out during the three-day event. Let me discuss the top three: digital transformation, arts labour and the need to recast cultural policies.

The Digital Conundrum

I have been deeply embedded in debates over the digital conundrum for two decades, whether the relationship between arts and technology, the formation of an in-house digital arts network at the Canada Council for the Arts, or the Banff Centre's digital dialogues, where a uniquely Canadian response to digital media as an emerging cultural force evolved between 1995 and 2005. I have seen firsthand the challenges that fast-emerging technologies pose for the arts. As I predicted five years ago, while reflecting on the state of affairs: “The culture sector will see a substantial overhaul as it will soon be data-driven.”

Traditional museological models are facing strong headwinds. Already disproportionately affected by the pandemic, public institutions are left further behind when they fail to make use of data and technology. In 2018, Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries, a 50-year-old association of art galleries and museums, where I am the executive director, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont., held the Ideas Digital Forum. It focused on using digital technology to help create, engage and deliver the core work of public art galleries. Two years later, Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries held a digital data mixer to introduce gallery staff to available data. A follow-up multi-year national project, Data Shy to Data Driven, is helping art institutions navigate the digital environment. 

It’s not lost on anyone that digital realities have been impacting all cultural sectors, especially by redefining audiences, both their geographic location and their behaviours. Job descriptions are changing, as are the roles of staff. Cultural institutions face a fundamental transformation as they try to define their place in the digital economy, expected to account for a third of global GDP – more than US$15 trillion – by 2025. The visual arts sector needs new policies and program architecture to facilitate the transition from traditional models to ones with new metrics for organizational success. And it’s important to remember that business models in the visual arts sector are much different than for the performing arts.

Unfortunately, these crucial topics never made it onto the summit’s agenda.

The opening panel was telling, where speakers were from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Canada Media Fund, which fosters the production of Canadian content in audiovisual media. In placing the summit’s central focus on a key part of the government’s policy agenda, Bill C-11, legislation that aims to regulate online streaming services, the summit’s focus was weighted to the performing arts and broadcasting, thus narrowing the conversation. 

This, unfortunately, is not a new trend. In 2017, we saw an earlier version ­– Creative Canada – during the tenure of the former heritage minister, Mélanie Joly. In this initiative, broadcasting policy was conflated with cultural policy and touted as a new vision for Canadian creative industries. Ira Wells, who teaches English and cultural criticism at the University of Toronto, made a dire prediction in an article that year in The Walrus. “Creative Canada won’t protect the distinctiveness of Canadian art,” he wrote, “but will shackle it to the homogenizing logic of corporate analytics, one that will result in snackable Canadian culture, one chasing web hits abroad in order to justify its funding at home.”

Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, is the updated version of Bill C-10, introduced last year by former heritage minister Steven Guilbeault to force streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime to feature Canadian programs, just as traditional broadcasters must already do. However, questions remain about its effectiveness. As Open Media asked last month in an article titled What’s wrong with Bill C-11?, will the legislation actually level the playing field between streaming companies and legacy broadcasters?

The government’s premise in 2017 was to “invest” in Canadian talent and “incentivize” risk-taking in a “platform-agnostic” way, according to film producer, writer and director Barri Cohen. “Nestling in all this is a lofty idea of shifting the focus from culture as an 'industry' to culture as a social enterprise that in turn drives the economy,” she wrote in a 2017 article in Point of View magazine. 

Now, the call is to address social change while the visual arts sector is flailing, and its workers migrate elsewhere. There is much more to digital transformation than the platform economy. The platform economy is not a panacea for all that ails art and culture in Canada.

Art Labour

During the summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that four independent agencies – La Fondation des artistes, the Actors’ Fund of Canada, the Canadian Dance Assembly and the Unison Benevolent Fund – would disburse $50 million through a temporary program that provides direct funding to independent, self-employed workers experiencing financial hardship in the live performing arts sector, to a maximum of $2,500 per person. I am glad about this financial help to the performing arts sector. But does that imply the whole spectrum of independent, self-employed workers in the visual arts are not struggling to eke out a living?

The labour crisis in the visual arts, as in other cultural sectors, is acute. I have written about how artists are central to post-pandemic recovery. The visual arts sector has been seeing departures from its labour force due to unsustainable wages and working conditions. The same thing is happening in Europe. A recent survey conducted by the Network of European Museum Organizations suggested that almost three-quarters of museums had reduced expenses through staffing cuts. Similar reports have emerged in the United States. A 2020 report from the International Council of Museums said one out of 10 museums, including art galleries, were likely to close. What are the consequences of this troubling trend? For one, there’s a critical gap in knowledge management, institutional history and sustainability as mid-career professionals exit the field. It’s a cruel irony that the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the hypocrisy about artists and their labour. It reflects how deeper questions related to cultural work, apart from lip service, continue to be an unattended policy issue. 

Recasting Cultural Policies 

We are now witnessing contestation between top-down policy responses and what’s been dubbed “cultural policy from below” – moves by cultural workers to enact practices of care and mutual aid as they advocate for policy changes. Scholars from three universities argued in a recent paper in the International Journal of Cultural Policy that articulations from below are “capable of cognitively reorienting us far enough out of the present organization of social relations – by, for example, delinking artists’ income from secondary jobs and a competitive granting system – that some kind of critical distance is achieved, and the political imagination of a different future is called to work.”

The opportunity for change is here now. We need to move beyond the narrow confines of political expediency and collectively work toward a transformative cultural agenda. We must relearn the language of art as a public good. What we accomplish in the next three to five years will dictate the course of the next four decades. History will judge us. The onus is on us to get it right. ■

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