Dancing Mounties, Flamingo Pink Jackets, Culture and Elitism

25 Apr 2011, Posted in Articles,Featured, 1 Comments

*** image caption: Christopher Drost, Rob Ford and Don Cherry, 2010. Courtesy: Christopher Drost

Dancing Mounties, Flamingo Pink Jackets, Culture and Elitism

By Kirsty Robertson

At the closing ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, as crooner Michael Buble belted out the lyrics to the 1867 nation-building anthem “The Maple Leaf Forever,” centre stage at BC Place Stadium was overtaken by a spectacle of dancing helium-filled balloon statues, including gigantic prancing moose and beavers, gold-medal-toting 20-foot-tall hockey players and plaid-shirted lumberjacks. As these massive balloons floated up to the stadium ceiling, groups of dancing backup singers dressed in scanty costumes that riffed on the well-known red-serge uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police can-canned across the stage. All of this dancing was set against a spectacular painted backdrop of mountains and pristine lakes and gigantic saluting Mountie statues. As the balloons drifted out of the stadium, they were replaced by a series of performances by some of Canada’s best (read, most lucrative) bands. The spectacle took stereotypes of Canadiana and blew them up (literally), in what was, according to the CBC coverage, “a tongue-in-cheek nod to everything Canadians are deeply proud to be.” [1]

Not long afterwards, and half-way across the country, a spectacle of a different, but connected, sort unfolded. On December 7, 2010, hockey commentator Don Cherry, “swathed in garish fluorescent pink, like an aggressive overgrown flamingo,”[2] was invited to “introduce” incoming Toronto mayor Rob Ford. In a speech notable primarily for its rambling incoherence, Cherry infamously denounced “left-wing pinko newspapers out there” who were “ripping him to shreds,” and “pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything,” before concluding that Rob Ford was “going to be the greatest mayor this city has ever seen, as far as I’m concerned, and put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks.” [3] Cherry’s comments belligerently echoed what has to now been a fairly quiet (though oft noted) shift to the right in Canadian politics and media. In a speech given a week prior to the ceremony, a less irate Cherry opined, “People are sick of the elites and artsy people running the show. It’s time for some lunch pail, blue-collar people.” [4] Despite the obvious critique that Ford is a wealthy career politician and hardly a blue-collar lunch-packing everyman, Cherry’s comments speak to a clear antagonism towards the “elite” arts that have characterized the last few years. The years since the global financial crisis have been kind neither to the arts nor to criticism, and with Don Cherry “telling it like it is” (even when it obviously isn’t), and the Olympic ceremony showcasing a bunch of tired stereotypes and CRIA [5] favourites as Canadian “culture,” it seems high time to assess and respond. [6]

How has the relationship between the arts, creative industries, economics and ideology in Canada changed in the short period between 2008 and the end of 2010? [7] There are two main points that I want to explore: first, to unfold this notion of “elitism” as it applies to art, creative industries, education and the place that we (writers and readers of this article) occupy in a changing system; second, to question how the positioning of culture as elite has affected the space for, and imagining of, critical response.

The precedent and context for Cherry’s comments was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pre-election October 2008 dismissal of artists as people who attend “rich galas” and live off “subsidies” provided by “ordinary working people.” [8]This remark, which came in the wake of nearly $45 million in cuts to the arts (especially the removal of “economically inefficient” programs such as Promart, Trade Routes, the Canadian Memory Fund, Canadian Culture Online, Audio-Visual Preservation Trust, Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) inspired reams of analysis and criticism. [9] When the Conservatives were not able to secure a majority in the 2008 election, many observers surmised that their stance on culture had lost them a significant number of votes, particularly in Québec [10] In the two years following the original statement, Harper made several attempts to, if not repair the damage, at least brand himself as less than a philistine, hammering out a Beatles tune on the piano (accompanied by cellist Yo-Yo Ma) at the National Arts Centre in October 2009; and singing rock songs to fellow Conservatives at the annual caucus Christmas party on Parliament Hill in December 2010. Both performances had much to do with making Harper seem looser, less threatening and less distant. But both performances also imagined culture as something to be consumed and reproduced rather than created and made. Had Harper shown a secret penchant for abstract painting rather than an ability to play piano, the result would have been completely out of line with the Conservative’s ideological platform on culture — to produce is elitist, to consume is populist.

In a recent issue of the New York Times, David Brooks, in trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon in the United States, wrote: “The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting. The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high….” [11] While there is, as yet, no Tea Party movement in Canada, [12] Brooks’ argument obviously resonates with Cherry’s speech, the Olympic ceremony and current political stances on culture. One might add that the shift to the right has not brought a return of a connoisseurship model of high art appreciation that has, in the past, been associated with conservatism. [13] Rather, in line with David Brooks’s observations, populist politicians have moved to criticize and defund the cultural projects and the arts supported by the supposed elite. I suggest that in addition to such repositioning, there is more at stake.

Though the language was slightly different, an argument against “cultural elitism” played an immensely important role in left-leaning cultural critique in Canada through the 1980s and 1990s. Anti-racist initiatives, as well as work done, for example, to encourage more equitable funding practices and more equitable representation in museums and galleries, often relied heavily on criticism of an elite that was keeping the doors of those museums and funding bodies closed. While there was plenty of evidence that an “elite culture” existed (and could be made fun of), that elitism was associated with the cultural project that had come out of the Massey Commission. Elite culture was, in other words, repeatedly associated with national sovereignty. In something of a circular argument, left-leaning and centrist arts activists both critiqued and also supported “Canadian” culture. Within such arguments, an elite culture that functioned as ballast against American popular culture could be decoupled from the elitist culture that was the focus of critique. For example, battles to secure more equitable funding for women or artists of colour from the Canada Council were not seen as opposed to government attempts to secure protection for culture on international stages (such as UNESCO or the negotiations leading up to the signing of the NAFTA). What changed was the economization and instrumentalization of culture through neoliberal globalization.

As Imre Szeman notes, “art was once defined by its opposition to the market.” Neoliberalism, in applying a market logic to social and political sectors, reversed the above logic, so that art could be defined through its relation to the market. No longer oppositional, the “culturepreneurial” artist, in fact, could be imaged as a model neoliberal citizen in a social situation where, as Szeman notes, the lines between work and leisure were erased, and work was seen as the site for self-expression, creativity and freedom. [14] Neoliberalism appeared to undermine any critical potential of art, while leaving open only one avenue of agency: economic potential.

In the wake of Harper’s ill-advised comments in October 2008, arts supporters across the country rallied against the cuts to the arts. Many did so, however, taking up the neoliberal mantra that the arts make important economic contributions to the Canadian GDP. Said Vancouver arts activist Adrienne Wong in a comment fairly typical of this vein of thought: “the government [is] actually hearing the outrage and recognizing that this community is a strong community, that we contribute to the economy, that we have an argument to be made and a voice that will be heard.” [15] There was a strategic shift from earlier models where the economic potential of art seemed at best a distant concern for those lobbying to secure visibility, understanding and funding for the arts. [16] By 2008, rhetoric had changed significantly and economic defenses became the primary methodology of much activism in the face of cuts from the Conservative minority government, particularly as that funding was then redirected to the spectacle of the Olympics and the associated cross-country torch relay. The danger here is that my argument will be read as a cultural nationalist one — that because there was a shift, what came before was better. This is not my intention at all, for neither model (cultural nationalism or neoliberalism) has much to offer cultural producers.

At the time, even as many arts activists were “economizing culture” to activist ends, some in government, the media, think tanks, academia and elsewhere began to decouple the idea of a national culture from the “creative industries.” In media coverage, the nomenclature generally employed refers to “arts and creative industries,” while “national” culture is less about status quo funding and the circulation of the arts and more about the spectacle of nationality; the Olympic closing ceremonies, for example, where national culture became a parodic spectacle of itself. This division in thinking is deeply connected to how the creative industries are practically applied, if not imagined, in Canada. In the 1998 Creative Industries report that launched the creative industries in the UK, the sector included 14 categories ranging from architecture to performing arts and antique markets. The authors of the report envisaged that economic growth would come through “exploitation” of knowledge, information and intellectual property emerging from such pursuits. In turn, the buzz created around culture would filter into other sectors — tourism, finance, etc.

In Canada, the term creative industries is often used to refer to the arts, but it is often subservient to the “knowledge economy,” which is much more closely associated with Richard Florida’s definition of a Creative Class that includes not just the arts (which are used as an entrepreneurial model), but also science, engineering, education, computer programming, research, health care, business and finance, the legal sector, and education.[17] In other words, a creative industry is more likely to be one associated with the tar sands than it is to be associated with the arts sector, since the development of the oil fields depends on technological innovation to be profitable. For the most part, when the federal government speaks about developing a knowledge economy, about creativity or innovation, the arts are at best a decorative but unnecessary component. In the 2009 Action Plan, for example, arts and culture were described as useful only insofar as they could, “navigate the changing technological and economic landscapes.” [18] In turn, although funding for the arts in some sectors has in fact increased under the Conservative government, in other sectors it has been dramatically cut (see, for example the cuts to Canadian Heritage that have seen Fuse Magazine itself put under pressure and forced into a more entrepreneurial model to stay afloat). Cultural priorities have been ideologically reaffirmed via different strategies for funding and circulating Canadian art.

I will conclude by suggesting what kinds of critical avenues are left or emerging from this situation. But first, I will briefly outline how the ongoing dismissal of the arts as “elite,” and the economization of culture that underpins the creative industries have very real results. I play this out through just one example, though there are many: the granting of “national” museum status to the (largely) privately funded Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg. The Human Rights Museum, established in Winnipeg by the late media mogul Izzy Asper, became the first major national museum outside of the capital region. [19] The federal government refused funds to the city of Toronto, which had, with (former) federal, provincial and municipal support, participated enthusiastically in a kind of starchitectural renovation project thought to encourage the creation of Creative Cities and the seduction of tourists, yet monies were granted to a museum outside of the traditional cultural core and for a project that had been initiated from a private source. [20] The case is a complicated one that cannot be covered in detail here, but much of the criticism of the museum has centered on Asper’s pro-Israel stance, and the way that such a “private” political vision might translate into the organization of what is supposedly a “public” museum (particularly one concerned with human rights). [21] What is also interesting is the way that media coverage of the museum (the completion of which has been delayed through three successive governments) was originally linked to Liberal aspirations for a larger international presence via a vibrant cultural landscape (leading to a promised $100 million from the Paul Martin Liberals) and eventually translated into an ideal public-private partnership under the Harper Conservatives.

Over time, the Human Rights Museum has become less an anomaly and more a model, and as such, it suggests a turn towards private partnerships that rely less on the economic potential of the arts to contribute to the GDP, and more on the unfettering of culture from state sponsorship and its movement into a market system. The move to open a “national” museum outside of Ottawa can be read, again, as “anti-elitist,” as an attempt to spread culture across the land rather than holding it tightly in the hands of a few power brokers in the capital city. The museum board has also been careful to distance itself as much as possible from the controversial statements of Izzy Asper, repeatedly stating that the board is independent. Interesting too is the way that the Human Rights Museum has relied extensively on public surveys in order to legitimize its mandate. On the surface, both the decentralized location of the museum and the reliance on public input seem to address some of the institutional “elitism” against which critics were reacting in the 1990s. [22] A closer look, however, suggests that in fact the Human Rights Museum will simply replicate what Paul Saurette calls “epistemological populism,” “a theory of knowledge that assumes that the most reliable and trustworthy type of knowledge is the direct individual experience of ‘common’ people — the lessons of which can be unproblematically universalized.” [23] Would the Art Gallery of Ontario have been open to Richard Hill’s “Meeting Ground” exhibition, which challenged the Eurocentrism of the collection from an aboriginal perspective, had the gallery been curated according to popular or public opinion? Call me an elitist, but the most important lessons that I’ve learned have always come when I’ve had to undo or unlearn something that I took as given.

Nevertheless, epistemological populism is an extremely effective strategy as it closes off avenues of response. If critical response is seen as too difficult, too wordy, too “educated,” then what is the alternative? Arguing on the grounds that a nation needs a culture? We’ve been there and done that and it was rife with problems the first time around. If the Conservative vision of culture is one of consumption, in fact, epistemological populism is incredibly productive, biopolitically reproducing itself in each response to something that is too difficult or boring to confront.

Against the backdrop of the global economic crisis and the demise of Lehman Brothers (and auctioning off of its art collection), culture has fallen far from the vaunted position it occupied in the 1998 Creative Industries report released in the UK. It seemed obvious, even at the time, that culture and the creative industries (no matter how they were defined) could not shoulder the kind of economic responsibility that came with trying to turn around post-manufacturing economies and merging multiethnic and unequally represented peoples into smoothly functioning docile and productive communities. Even then, the critiques of the neoliberalization of culture were largely aimed at unraveling the misrepresentation (actually, artists are not elites, and culture-preneurialism with its incessant working hours and low pay is not necessarily a model that should be emulated), rather than worrying about what would come next. What happens to a creative city model, for example, if the creative city is shown to be economically inexpedient (Richard Florida’s increasingly far-fetched responses to the global economic crisis and the role for the creative industries therein is a clear case in point)? [24]

Should we be worried about this? I think so, because I see it reflected everywhere, translated into a sort of self-loathing, a turn away from critical politics, and an outright distrust of the kind of sustained critical thought that led in many ways to the opening up of the cultural scene in the 1990s and 2000s. Further, it is present not only in the cranky and curmudgeonly “everyday” Don Cherry supporters, but also in cultural workers, students, arts administrators and others who are the targets of those flippant dismissals. In part, this may come from the difficulty of trying to level an argument which can be met with such casual retorts — it is difficult to explain the vagaries of a political-economic system when the rejoinder can be boiled down to the single word “elitist.” Perhaps also those labeled elitist are often those mired in student debt, or with low income, with little political agency and little opportunity at all in a system that resents them and that positions economic reversal of the recession as increasingly the only goal at local, national and global levels. Having to constantly justify culture is hard work, and the politically expedient response seems to be to do it on an economic level. But there is a need for something more — the response to Don Cherry, for example, unfortunately seemed to focus primarily on his choice of jacket. It is time to react. It is time to create.

Kirsty Robertson is an elitist, bike-riding, bus-taking, pinko, left-wing kook who doesn’t smoke pipes. She does bring her lunch to work, sometimes in a pail. She is working on her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision and Culture in Canada and is hoping that Toronto Roller Derby (TORD) will be successful in opposing Rob Ford and keeping the Downsview bus running to their practice space.

[1] Point of View, “Olympic Closing Ceremonies: What did you Think of Them?” (1 March 2010): http://www.cbc.ca/news/pointofview/2010/03/olympic-closing-ceremonies-what-did-you-think-of-them.html.

[2] Andrew Cohen, “Politics as Cheap Entertainment,” The Ottawa Citizen (14 December, 2010), p. A16.

[3] The full text of Cherry’s speech can be found here: http://torontoist.com/2010/12/don_cherrys_speech_to_council_transcribed.php.

[4] The quote comes from a Dec 2010 speech, reported in David Rider, “Why Don Cherry Backs Rob Ford,” Toronto Star (3 December 2010): http://www.thestar.com/news/torontocouncil/article/901562–why-don-cherry-backs-rob-ford?bn=1

[5] Canadian Recording Industry Association, whose work to secure IP protection for their property/artists forms an undercurrent to ways of culture has and will be understood in the twenty-first century.

[6] The power of an anti-elitist argument became apparent to me as I tried to write this sentence – everything I wrote sounded like it had been channeled through the very language that was being dismissed as elite. Assess and respond? Why not just form a Royal Commission.

[7] These dates are chosen because this article can be seen as a follow up to “Crude Culture: Canada and the Creative Industries,” which I wrote for Fuse in 2008, prior to the global financial meltdown.

[8] The full quote is: “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies have actually gone up, I don’t think that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”

[9] The Liberal Party has tried, relatively unsuccessfully, to document the ideological impetus behind Tory spending cuts, while also pointing out the paradox between the image of “competent economic management” circulated by the Conservative government, and actual deficit spending and increasingly low rates of productivity.  See Dan Veniez, “Tory Times are Tough Times,” The Mark (14 September, 2010): http://www.themarknews.com/articles/2366-tory-times-are-tough-times?page=2. See also Marc Léger, “The Non-Productive Role of the Artist: The Creative Industries in Canada,” Third Text 24 (2010), pp. 557-70.

[10] Peter Birnie, “Harper’s Slighting of the Arts Comes Back to Bite Him.” Vancouver Sun (15 October, 2008), p. A13.

[11] David Brooks, “Tea Party Teens,” The New York Times (4 January 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05brooks.html.

[12] Though there is a Tea Party Movement of Canada Facebook group with approximately 1,700 members.

[13] For example, see the writing of critic Hilton Kramer. The idea that there is (or was) some relationship between conservatism, class and taste has formed the basis of a number of extremely important critical projects (see for example, the work that has come out of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus).

[14] Imre Szeman, “Out With the New,” in Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton and Kirsty Robertson, eds. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (forthcoming).

Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] As mentioned in “Crude Culture” (2008), an obvious example of this was the 2007 Visual Arts Summit in Ottawa – a huge undertaking to bring those working in the arts together across a broad range of interests. However, at the weekend meetings where a huge variety of strategies for securing visibility came up, economic importance or the idea of the creative industries were almost completely absent.

[17] See Invest Toronto, “Creative Industries Sector,” http://www.investtoronto.ca/Business-Toronto/Key-Business-Sectors/Creative-Industries.aspx.

[18] http://www.actionplan.gc.ca/eng/feature.asp?featureId=4

[19] There are others, including the National Railway Museum in Montreal and Pier 21 in Halifax, but neither of these are on the scale of the Human Rights Museum.

[20] While there is an extensive recent history of museums and galleries having to find matching funds from private sources, this is categorically different from projects that begin with private funding. See Barbara Jenkins, “Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance,” Canadian Journal of Communication 30 (2005), pp. 169-86.

[21]  For just one example see Lubomyr Luciuk, “A Human Rights Museum for All,” The Mark (19 January 2011): http://www.themarknews.com/articles/3790-a-human-rights-museum-for-all . Luciuk has been a long-time critic of the Human Rights Museum, and previously of the Canadian War Museum.

[22] Unless one happens to be a cultural nationalist such as Liberal supporter, Historica director, historian and pundit Andrew Cohen who has argued repeatedly that cultural institutions should be grouped together in Ottawa, and that citizens should come to their capital city as part of a nation building exercise.

[23] Paul Saurette, “When Smart Parties Mark Stupid Decisions,” The Mark (23 July 2010): http://www.themarknews.com/articles/1907-when-smart-parties-make-stupid-decisions

[24] Take, for example, Florida’s work during the Olympics, which argued that Creative Cities produced medal-winning athletes.