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Valuing Culture: Measuring and Understanding Canada’s Creative Economy
The Conference Board of Canada (July 2008) | weblink
Prepared by The Conference Board of Canada for the International Forum on the Creative Economy.
This report highlights the substantial social, cultural, and economic contributions of Canada’s culture sector and assesses its economic footprint. This report is a joint initiative of the Conference Board’s Organizational Effectiveness and Learning Division and Forecast and Economics Division, in collaboration with the Government of Canada’s Department of Canadian Heritage.
See also: ‘Arts and cultural industries add billions of dollars to Canadian economy’, The Conference Board of Canada News Release, September 16, 2008 | weblink
4 comments:
If the arts and culture industry is so strong, then it does not need government money to support it. I'd rather use my tax money to go see Elliot Brood then toss it away on an orbital banana.
Hi Foster,
It's very important to consider the difference between for-profit cultural industries and non-profit initiatives.
For profit cultural pursuits include all forms of design (graphic, fashion, industrial, interior, etc.), blockbuster films, most publishing, "creative" portrait photography, and even things like advertising.
Non-profit arts involve the development and dissemination of ideas that are experimental, conceptual, and challenging. In many cases, the non-profit sector involves critical social, political, philosophical, and intellectual research. It is these experimental practices -- combined with efforts to make them open and accessible to all people -- that need public support in order to maintain quality production and presentation.
So much of what is now widely acceptable was a popular commercial culture was, at an earlier time, considered undesirable. The work of the Impressionists (i.e. Monet) and Cubists (i.e. Picasso) was originally reviled and deemed offensive to the eye. Closer to home, Canada's darlings, the Group of Seven, were originally known as the "hot mush school" because their work was so utterly abhorred by the general population. More recently, consider Andy Warhol. When his Factory first unveiled their Brillo boxes and soup cans and underground cinema, they were met with laughter, yet today their work has been so widely accepted that it is even be co-opted for purposes completely contradicting Warhol's original intentions.
The non-profit arts provide moments of difference to encourage people to think about the world around them in new ways. They shine light on things some people/groups would prefer to ignore, they offer insights into alternatives, and they reflect diversity ... all concepts that are important to meaningful human development. Artists *are* forecasters, and the best proof of this is in the fact that their ideas are often "borrowed" by corporations via advertising agencies.
The non-profit arts are also about access. The Canadian and US models of everything but art is so completely strange to people in other parts of the world. In Germany, for example, sports and arts/culture receive equal airtime on the evening news. In Canada, as a result of limited arts funding, people really have to go out of their way to track down cultural acitivities. And, if they don't know certain things exist, how can they know if they even find them interesting.
I realize it's a cliché to think about sports and arts as some kind of inherent dichotomy, but think about how we are all provided opportunities to play sports in school and watch team sports on television. Furthermore, we have so many opportunities to listen to insider analysis and commentary about how games are played, player injuries, team dynamics, trades, etc. The arts aren't discussed in the same way. As children, we learn to make crafts and are told art is something meant to be decorative, but we never get to think about art as a history of ideas, or as a strategy of communication. As children/older students, we don't even get reasonable access to the art of our own era. Imagine being sheltered from current sporting events, and given the impression that the only things that exist are re-runs of past World Series.
Public support for increased public access to non-profit arts is about giving us – all people! – opportunities to think, to be critical, to be inspired, and to use different parts of our brains when analyzing situations.
That all being said, without non-profit arts, there would be nothing created to stimulate and motivate the for-profit sector. Those ideas don't materialize out of nothing... the come from a careful contemplation of art making practices as a whole and they are the result of earlier experiments eventually making their way into mainstream consciousness.
To stifle the non-profit arts sector is to stifle innovation. No one would consider cutting R&D subsidies for the manufacturing sector as that would be seen as economic suicide. So, if the for-profit arts sector generates so much cash from taking ideas produced by independent thinkers earlier in history, it is clear that reducing support to the non-profit sector means limiting future opportunities.
Well clearly there are some Canadians who would advocate elimination of R&D subsidies, myself one of them.
What you have essentially told me is that my tax money is need to promote art in Canada. I agree. You think the government should do it. I don't. I'd rather direct that money to the charity, or artist, or my choice.
My tax dollars, and yours, are better spent on effective art promoting charities than on government bureaucracy for a select few. Grass roots advocacy for the arts would be far more effective than wasting our tax dollars with the government.
But what about professional rigor and peer-review? The benefit of a process that encompasses both is that it ensures both quality and diversity at the same time.
As someone who has studied art history and curatorial practice, who has worked in (and challenged) my field for over a decade, and who had seen both sides of the granting process (by participating in juries AND experiencing the arduous process of applying for project, operations, and travel grants... and not always getting them, no matter how great I might have thought my project/application was), I can honestly say that the system we have -- while not perfect -- is well poised to ensure that people from all parts of the country, with professional commitment to a wide array of critical cultural practices.
Culture is not a charity and thinking of it as such makes comparisons to a cancer foundation or the like, and that takes it out of context. It's not a question of one individual picking one painter over another in the same way an individual might chose to donate to breast cancer instead of colon cancer. Culture is a form of intellectual and social research and it works when all types of cultural pursuits are developed, critiqued, and viewed in context of one another.
But that being said, I've never figured out why cancer foundations separate themselves, either. What good comes out of one type of cancer research competing with other type? If all the money is put together into one pot and distributed it by professionals who know what they're doing through proven experience working in their field, then I think that's a better way to make sure money is distributed in a considerate, equitable, and accountable fashion.
Just as spending money on marketing various cancer foundations doesn't help find a cure, spending exorbitant amounts on marketing the arts doesn't help to produce quality work. It's merely shifting money from one sector (non-profit arts/culture) to another (for profit advertising and media agencies).
I want my tax money spent *directly* on that which does the most good. And this is possible! If Canadian media agencies did a better job reporting on the arts via intelligently written critical reviews and editorials as they do in Europe, then further marketing beyond press releases, fliers/posters and electronic communications list wouldn't even be necessary. The types of marketing described above are done at minimal cost and again, why spend money on marketing when you can spend money on content or, product, if I can allow myself to use that word to elucidate my point in this context only.
On the subject of grass roots advocacy... Foster, having worked as an independent cultural producer with zero budget and having worked at artist run centres in Canada, AND being able to compare these experiences with experience working in Europe where cultural organizations are extremely well funded through tax dollars, I can't even begin to emphasize just how much Canadian cultural organizations rely on grass roots strategies. Even just look at Department of Culture. As an informal coalition of arts and cultural workers struggling to improve the conditions affecting all aspects of life in Canada, I think it's safe to say that "we get it" when it comes to banding together and working for what little we've got.
best,
DoC
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