by David Maggs,the Metcalf Fellow on Arts & Society
The Dilemma
Cultural production from cultural non-profit sectors—how arts organizations produce and present their work—has changed very little in Canada over the past fifty years. Cultural participation—both how Canadians are meeting their cultural needs, and what those needs are—has changed a lot. As a result, the gap between cultural production and cultural participation in Canada is growing wider. This has produced a steady pattern of decline in earned revenues over the past few decades, the effects of which have largely been dampened by increased cultural funding at national, provincial, and municipal levels over the past decade. As public funding declines in real terms, and the cost of production continues to rise, the underlying feasibility of non-profit culture making in Canada is under increasing duress. In the wake of sudden closures, contracted seasons, and increasingly alarming reports in both public media and the backrooms of cultural policymaking, a new dilemma is emerging. Can we maintain status quo operations of our cultural sector or have we reached a point where deeper, more fundamental adjustments to business-as-usual are required?
Sustaining in our DNA
Canada’s cultural sector, like so many non-profit sectors worldwide, is built on a virtue of sustaining the status quo. Organizations, policy making, and funding mechanisms are built to maintain what they already know how to do. With minimal capacity to experiment, invent, and innovate, Canada’s cultural sector is not built to transform. Unlike many other sectors, we are not set up to try new things, stabilize promising discoveries, or scale those discoveries across a sector desperately in need of new opportunities.
Two things are helpful to keep in mind here. First, invention and innovation are central to other sectors’ strategy for survival–change is how they sustain. Second, as culture sectors consider the dilemma of ‘sustain vs. transform’ we must recognize our minimal capacity with the latter. First, this may bias an openness towards it, second, it signals its urgency amidst such disrupted times, and third, it shapes our relationship to it as one of preliminary exploration—what does transformation mean for a cultural sector and how should we go about implementing it?
Messy signals
A central difficulty of this dilemma lies with measuring the severity of our circumstances. An obvious indicator of decline might be earned revenue, but establishing clear data here is not as straightforward as it should be. Secondly, many feel it should not indicate sectoral health at all. That even if demand evaporates, rather than a cue to reduce public funding as throwing good money after bad, it should signal the opposite—that we must do more to buffer essential forms of cultural production from market dynamics. Finally, amidst this trend of revenue decline, successful outliers in the sector cloud the narrative and make it hard to perceive an overall pattern, let alone rally much in the way of response.
Taking the wrong risk
As climate scientist John Robinson is fond of saying, in contexts of deep disruption, even business-as-usual is transformational. When things require urgent response, doing nothing will change the status quo, just not in a way we want. We are starting to see this in the growing closures, urgency, and precarity around the sector right now. By not responding in proactive, experimental, innovative fashion, the sector is taking a much bigger risk than if it does.
Closing windows of opportunity
Not only might we be taking the wrong risk by doing nothing rather than something, it will get harder to take the right risk as time goes on. During the pandemic, we were sustained by generous public support while remaining free from standard operating pressures, leaving us financially in historically good shape. Instead of taking advantage of this unusual condition, the sector did relatively little by way of structured experimentation. As the pandemic eased, instead of responding to abundant data to the contrary, we built policy and funding in response to the myth that Canadians’ cultural needs had been going unmet without us. We plowed resources into returning to status quo activity, overproducing, underselling, and returning organizational bottom lines to the red within a single season.
After squandering once-in-a-generation cultural funding on a belief that returning to business-as-usual was viable, we now find ourselves without the same luxury of time and space within which to explore and experiment, while facing diminishing public funding, expanding production costs, and the growing pressure to simply survive. The means and opportunities to transform ourselves are beginning to close. As they do, that gap between cultural production and cultural needs grows wider, our relevance to the public imagination continues to decline, and the calls for public support for the arts will fall on evermore indifferent ears, leaving both options – transforming and sustaining – increasingly out of reach.
Responding the Canadian way
The central message of Art and the World After This, produced by the Metcalf Foundation during the heart of the pandemic, remains pertinent to the growing concerns around the viability of Canada’s cultural non-profits:
To respond proactively to our own problems and to contribute meaningfully to challenges in the wider world, a significant portion of our activity needs to shift from a paradigm of ‘production and presentation’ to one driven by innovation.
In other words, we do not need to shift from business-as-usual en masse, but to develop and integrate a spirit and practice of innovation and R&D that opens structured exploration of creative, fiscal, policy, and resourcing opportunities needed to close the gap between how Canada’s cultural non-profits produce culture and how the country participates in culture. It is, in other words, a classically Canadian response to the dilemma of sustain vs. transform—a middle ground where we seed enough of the adaptive change we require, such that our overall spirit of sustaining what we love can prove viable for the very different demographics and generations already here and yet to come.
Thank you David for contributing to this blog and to the wider discussion about what opportunities exist for the arts sector moving forward. Your article helps articulate both the present circumstances and the perils of non-action. We are interested to hear the response from the Calgary and Alberta arts community!
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