In the 90s I lived in Regina, Saskatchewan. When I moved there I had never been before, but I had been looking for work, my PhD in-progress dissertation was a bit of a train wreck (I finished it eventually), and the university there was kind enough to offer me a position. Our lives go through stages, and for me a bit of moving around, but when I look back on my Regina days, the thing I remember most fondly was the group of friends I had who were all very interested in contemporary culture, who liked to take it in, and talk about it at the pub. There was really only one art gallery to speak of, which specialized in showing prairie artists, but when there was the opening of a new show, say every six weeks or so, we all went, made a night of it, and, when funds permitted, bought stuff. In my home now, having left Regina 22 years ago, I have more original art from Saskatchewan than from everywhere else combined. There was one small bookstore – I know people with bigger kitchens than this store – who specialized in good contemporary books. We all went there too, read the new stuff, and more conversation. There was just one non-multiplex place to see movies, a film series at the public library, but, again, we all went. This all might be a matter of the era – who I was at the time, and the state of culture more widely: smart phones had not yet come along to wreak havoc on our lives. So, caveat lector. But that’s what I remember.
The City of Portland is looking at its public funding for the arts this year, reviewing its controversial (and, to me, unwise) poll tax for the arts – here is a good write-up of the issues. When I clicked a few links, I came to the discussion of their new plan, which is to combine arts and parks into a new administrative unit called “Vibrant Communities.”
That word (no, not “Communities” – that’s for another day) Vibrant. Can we talk about moving on from it? The DataArts folks at SMU provide an annual ranking of “Arts-Vibrant” cities. Their method (they call it “methodology” – but that’s for a different another day) is given here. They take data of three types – artists and presenting organizations; money spent on the arts; and government funding for the arts – all per capita, and then assign various weights to these figures. I have a lot of problems with it. Government funding is an input to the arts system, but the variable of interest is what comes out the other end. The weights assigned are purely subjective, though with a veneer of serious objective quantification of the arts. And measuring the arts offerings of a city per capita is odd. If I really like live theatre, and a city of 100,000 people has two theatres, and a city of 400,000 has seven, I’d likely prefer, on theatre-going grounds, the bigger city, though the smaller one has more theatres per capita. Is Cincinnati really more arts-rich than Chicago?
But a bigger question is to ask what “vibrant” is meant to capture. The measure from SMU seems to be: lots of arts places. But is that what matters? Jackson, Wyoming is the most vibrant small city by this measure, and here’s what they’ve got. A lot of tourist art, but if that’s the focus (and I don’t blame artists for trying to sell to tourists!) what would it be like to actually live there? Chacun à son goût, but you couldn’t pay me to do so.
City planners adopt the “vibrant” mindset, which I will place at the foot of the mania for attracting the “creative class” that began in 2002, but it comes down to: we need to build buildings and have an “arts district”. Now, sure, sometimes a city really does need a new building, a venue to host things. (The cover of my book is of the “opera house” in tiny Mitchell, Indiana – at the beginning of the last century the state of Indiana, in its wisdom, thought every county should have at least one place to host lectures, recitals, plays, art, and whatnot. It was a great policy.) But a cultural life – how people in the city or town actually live – cannot be bought that way.
Actual cultural life depends on at least a part of the population that is really involved in enjoying it, that is willing to entertain the new, that make it an important part of their lives. I don’t think this can be measured – “arts participation” asks if people showed up at stuff, which is not the same thing at all – and I don’t really see any way it can be purchased by a city government. But what the arts policy field insists on calling “vibrant” doesn’t really give us much, certainly not a sense of vibrancy.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
