Romanow Report for the Arts
Lalo Espejo and Max Wyman make up for a lost opportunity
On May 4, three of us from the VR went to the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library to hear Max Wyman discuss his new book, The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters (Douglas & McIntyre, 2004). It’s a topic that seems to have fallen off the public radar, and certainly wasn’t being discussed in the run-up to the federal election. So the chance to see Wyman bring a combative spirit to the issue seemed like a good idea—especially compared with the tame author events that usually take place in the Van Dusen Room. We were ready, so to speak, for “a bruisin’ in the Van Dusen.” Judging by the size of the crowd—about 200—it was apparent that others were ready as well. Maybe it was the format that stymied the event. Max spoke first to summarize his points, rather soberly—the same tone that a Globe and Mail reviewer had criticized him for taking in the book. Then city councillor Jim Green joined in to “lead” the discussion. I can assure you that none ensued. Green took every opportunity to highlight everything he’s done for culture in this city. If he deferred to Wyman, it was only to—how shall I put this?—suck up to him. How did a lively evening with Max Wyman turn into the Jim Green Ego Hour? I have no answer. Herewith, the discussion that was meant to have taken place:
LE: Given that classic “defence of culture” arguments have been around since the Greeks, is something going on today that makes it timely to present them again?
MW: I feel a real yearning on the part of society for a reaffirmation of the cultural/spiritual saga of this. We’re so material and we’re so technological that there seems to be a need to put something in place that is beyond materialistic, that allows us to become “fine-textured” human beings. One of the current themes is the need to integrate an understanding of arts and culture in our education system, because if people don’t grow up with a sense of what the arts can do for them, there’s no suggestion that they’ll want to pressure politicians to support creative activity. And I don’t just mean the Vancouver Symphony and the Canadian Opera, but all kinds. It felt to me that there’s a real need now to inform them. Particularly since there are some very disturbing trends in government, which are away from that kind of spiritual affirmation and towards a technological and science-based society.
LE: After your 35 years as cultural critic with The Vancouver Sun, is this an end-of-career exercise? Is this your Romanow Report for the Arts?
MW: In a sense, it is a “give back.” The dedication is to the arts community. But it’s trying to advance that cause as well. It is my Romanow Report, in a sense. It began out of a conversation I had when I was on the board of the Canada Council with the then-deputy minister of heritage, Alex Himelfarb. We share a lot of ideas in terms of the social agenda and the importance of culture. He came to the council one day to talk about the heritage department’s priorities, and we got into a spirited debate. He said, “What I really need is a document that lays out the arguments for culture. My bureaucrats can’t do it. They aren’t writers. You’re a writer. Here’s your challenge.” That was four years ago and I’ve been working on it ever since. It’s the culmination of everything that I’ve learned and I’m grateful for.
LE: Since you were issued this challenge and you rose to it, is there some responsibility for the powers-that-be to implement what you’ve presented?
MW: I’d love to see that happen. I wouldn’t be that arrogant to presume I’ve got all the answers, but I’ve got a framework they can work from. What I’m finding gratifying is doing a lot of round tables across the country and talking, through universities and arts councils—they bring together business people, arts bureaucrats, arts organizations, people from across society—generally to 20 to 30 people about the issues in the book. I’ve found again and again that they’ve been waiting for this. It’s a tool kit of arguments, with the reasoning behind them. And I get a sense that we’re at a tipping point of these arguments.
LE: Arts really isn’t a big issue on the table right now…
MW: Well, part of it is that politicians sniff the wind, and they don’t see a big interest on the part of communities. They’re frightened to say, “We’re going to put money into something as frivolous as the arts when health and education need this money.” In fact, my argument against that is that culture is as fundamentally important. Culture is as much a pillar of civilized society as health. We need health for life. We need arts and culture to make life worth living.
LE: Do you expect your book to be read by anybody other than the converted?
MW: I’m hoping it will, and in fact it is. I’m shameless about promoting it. Wherever I go I keep a little pack of flyers in my pocket and give it to everybody. People who are not the “converted” are picking it up out of curiosity. I had an email this morning from a woman I met at a soiree in Shaughnessy. It had been a mind-change for her. This is the way it’s going to go. When you bring these arguments across to people it builds up public will, and part of it is long-term.
LE: In the book you use the analogy of the federal government’s Participaction program. Can you give me a sense of how that would work in this context?
MW: Well, if we can spend $20 million on flags, as we did, we can certainly give every kid in the country a voucher to use for any form of arts activity. You can take it to the theatre, you can go to the ballet, art gallery, anything you like. That’s participaction. One of the suggestions I make is that there be a web-access program that allows people to take courses for free in art history and art appreciation. I think we can set up a national program that allows people, for free, to get access to each other, to exchange their art and be directed to resources.
LE: The only time we ever hear about public funds being spent on the arts is when we hear about things like the “meat dress,” or the hung rabbits. However one feels about these things, we have to ask, “What about bad art?” Should we not be offended when $100,000 of public funds is spent on creating some atrocious abomination?
MW: To the question of, “Why should we fund bad art?” Well, we don’t know if it’s going to be bad art or not. It’s very much a risk—it’s R&D money. Artists can often paint a great picture of what they think they’re going to do, and they can’t always deliver. On the other hand, people do. Margaret Atwood: $7,000 bucks for Surfacing. It’s R&D risk money and we’ve got to recognize that. We’re comfortable with that in business, in medicine.
The other aspect to your question is the knee-jerk response to scandal. The media is really culpable in this regard. It feeds off that superficial, scandalized response to the meat dress or the dead bunnies or the guy who painted the X in his blood at the National Art Gallery and was banned for it. Very rarely will the media go beyond and look at what these things are about. The meat dress was about the commodification of women and women’s bodies. The dead bunnies was about how we are obsessed with remains. Istvan Kantor is trying to make the personal statement in a depersonalized world. These are all interesting ideas. The rigid right wing says we can’t spend money on this nonsense, because they’re not prepared to think, to be challenged—because it’s frightening. We’re all frightened to be thrown off this little precarious bit of balance we try to find in our lives. Artists do that all the time—they shove us off.
We’re terrified of art 1) because we don’t understand it, 2) because we think it’s something exclusive and unavailable, and 3) because it challenges our comfort.
LE: How much of a disconnect do you think there is between successful artists and beginners? Do you suppose that the average person just believes that successful artists appear out of the ether? We don’t think about the fact that Robert Lepage, or Atom Egoyan, or Mike Myers, for that matter, actually struggled at the beginning of their careers.
MW: You’re right. I think there is a disconnect—people don’t think it through. If they think about it at all, they’re thinking about little Johnny who’s playing the saxophone in the school band, but Johnny will very rarely go on to be a professional saxophonist. But they won’t think that Mike Myers came from hard work, from someone who was fostered. The same thing with Margaret Atwood, or Doug Coupland—he came out of Emily Carr [School of Art and Design]. We’re very proud of our artists when they go abroad and carry the Canadian flag. Yann Martel and Stan Douglas—we’re very proud of them, but there is a disconnect between where they come from and how they get there.
LE: You spend a lot of time in the early parts of the book defending the purity of art, and then you make this statement: “The artistic community is coming to recognize that it must make itself as attractive as possible to the corporate culture.” Some might read that statement to mean, “Artists should just grow up and become more commercial.”
MW: I know. It’s a real dilemma. That’s trying to recognize the fact that to survive in the material world, you’ve got to have a material approach. There’s no way today that an arts organization can attract funding from private-sector sponsorship without proving to those businesses that 1) they’ve got something to offer them. It’s got to be quid pro quo—the whole idea of patrons is out the window. And 2) they’ve got to prove to them that they are well-run businesses. That’s the business side of making art. Ideally, we shouldn’t have to worry about that, but of course this is the world we live in. So we have to recognize the pragmatics. On the other hand, you’re not selling widgets. You can be properly managed, you can have the right marketing program and so on, but ultimately you’re not there to make a profit. You’re not there to sell a good, you’re there to provide it.
LE: You’ve been criticized for the tone of the book: it’s very academic and straightforward. Talking to you now, you’re very passionate. It’s easy to get swept up in your enthusiasm, so I wonder if you regret choosing the tone that you did?
MW: I guess I do, actually. I thought it was more passionate than the way it comes across to people. I think the front end has passion to it, as does the back end, but there’s a lot of dry stuff in the middle, and it’s dense because of the arguments I have to make. When I go out and do these round tables, or deliver speeches, I do it with a great deal of involvement, and people respond to that. The passion should have been in there stronger—yeah, it’s a fault.
I think I was so determined to make the case as strongly as I could, and didn’t want to get carried away making statements I couldn’t support.
Frankly, I have a plan, which you’re the first to hear about. I want to do a parents’ version of this. A “Doctor Spock” to make the case clearly and passionately, without any other bureaucratic government stuff in there about why this stuff is important. Because ultimately, yes I try to make all the social harmony, social health and economic arguments, but they’re beside the point. This stuff matters because it matters to us as individuals. It’s the transformative effect. It’s the way artists put us on that bridge between where we are now and where we can imagine we might be. It’s that link with the possible.
Thirty-five years of going to the theatre, dance, galleries, reading books, has totally changed my life. It changes all our lives. As a critic I wanted to come out of a show somehow different than when I went in. Most times you can get that if you’re open to it. We get so locked into survival. All the other arguments are just a way of propping up society’s recognition and support of that value of cultural experience.
LE: Can you summarize for the benefit of VR readers the most important baby steps?
MW: Okay, baby steps—big baby steps: 1) Reintegrate culture into education. Make sure that access to cultural expression is available to every learner. Not just in school but from pre-K through to post-secondary. Integrate the possibility to express yourself. Learning how to make art and learning through art. Artistic involvement develops the individual in ways the basic curriculum doesn’t. It develops leadership and confidence and open-mindedness.
2) The next big baby step, which I get to at the end of the book—and it’s something that’s becoming more and more important to me—is for government to establish culture as a basic point of principle, as basic as health, as basic as defence, and even to the point of writing a one- or two-page statement of belief that is distributed to every department of government. Roads, defence, health, education … the lot. And requiring them to bear these principles in mind in every spending and planning decision they make, so that it becomes integral to the way we run society. Now, if you do that, it becomes quite impervious to political change as politicians come and go. It should not be the special fiefdom of the Department of Canadian Heritage, or foreign affairs. It should belong to everybody. When we do that, then we start to change the entire social mass.
Those are my two big steps and from there everything else will follow. You develop a population who, when they come out of schools, will be sensitized to why these things are important, and will be ready to understand why we support it and why sometimes it goes awry, and you get the scandals, but at the same time recognize what it contributes to society. You’d have a willingness to support artists in a way that we don’t do right now. That parsimonious sense of, “Well, we’ll tolerate you.” I hate that word “tolerate” because what it means is, “I’m good and you’re okay.” Understanding is what we need, and if we can do those two things, then I think we’re well on the road to reintegrating culture into society and being able to realize the fruits and the richness of this exchange of personal expression.
When I was reviewing opera for the Sun, I would come out of the theatre and people would say, “What do I think?” I mean, they can think whatever they want to think. I make it up a lot of the time. I mean, when I’m reviewing dance, I quite often make it up. When artists show me their art it belongs to me, not to them. That may be a radical thought, but that sense of ownership is crucial. We don’t realize that it does belong to us and we can do what we like with it.
Copyright © Lalo Espejo, 2004