Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art
In June 2001 an item on CBC Radio Two's The Arts Report included a sound bite from the Banff television festival. It was of an award presenter rhyming off the countries - at least half a dozen - involved in one of the many co-produced winning programs. "Can anybody think of any more?" he concluded to audience laughter. The news from Banff was that multiple co-productions were not news. Moreover, they could not be interpreted as the counter-hegemonic creations of countries united against American culture industry giants. The cosmopolitan financing, production, and distribution teams often included American partners.
This incident illustrates the current context for cultural production in Canada that is the focus of this collection. As the editors argue, "Whether we think in terms of cultural theory and analysis, the relationship between nationalism and aesthetic ideologies, cultural and economic frameworks for government policy, the relationship between national cultures and the globalization of cultural marketplaces, or more broadly, the perceived relationship between culture, space and economics as a whole, all these have been radically altered over the past ten or fifteen years" (p. 2).
Confronting this context, Capital Culture is part elegy and part exercise in brisk self-discipline. In it the children of Canada's nationalist modernism struggle with their cultural patrimony. Reluctantly (because who else is going to provide the funds?) they dissect the state's role in influencing the cultures of Canada. According to their own interpretation, the policies that contributed to the making of modern Canada, in their nature-fetishizing Group of Seven canons and latent anti-cosmopolitanism, also inhibited the formation of a mature civil society able to withstand the close partnership of state and market. After decades in which the state has been dramatized as the opposite of the market, Canadian culture critics such as those in this book are examining the various strata of their partnership.
The original impetus for this book was a 1994 conference at York University on Art and Money. Like other such events of the mid-1990s it was consumed by the increasing commodification of culture and with a sense of betrayal at the impact of market ideology on public policy. The conference was also one of the series of conferences marking the centennial of the birth of Harold Innis. The book's 23 essays and artworks are grouped under five subheadings, which may not be as meaningful as a list of their themes: art markets, the analysis of cultural labour, the state and censorship, national art canons in Canada and Quebec, the state cultural-policy apparatus, the relationship of film production to film ideologies, and the need for a political economy of the information order. Many are influenced by and use Innis' work, but none are studies in Innis.
Jody Berland, in her spacious and elegantly written essay, is the chief provider of connections between Innis, modernism, and nationalism, and a subtheme of the social production of space. She emphasizes the national particularity of Canadian modernism as it emerged from conflict between various interests, was codified by the Massey Commission report, and pursued by government policymakers. The disdain for popular culture, the cultivation of an "aesthetic disposition," and the rationalization of cultural production that characterized this modernism, as she notes, eventually diminished "the ability of intellectuals and artists to work outside of or to adequately contest the dualistic discourses of fine art versus culture industry" (p. 29). But Berland also observes that the intentions of the cultural elites and their political supporters in the 1940s and '50s "were not the sole authors of their effects" (p. 29).
If it is possible to identify a similarity among the papers here - other than a strong grasp of theory, as well as creativity and strong writing - it is that together, and in many cases within individual essays, they reflect a characteristic dilemma of Canadian culture critics giving up on the abandoning parental state. They demonstrate a remarkably detailed and coherent understanding of, for example, Canadian art markets, arts institutions, and policy processes, and a helpful capacity to illuminate cultural debate by moving art-making to the foreground and creating fresh readings of warhorses such as Innis' late essays on culture. But at the same time, one has the impression that the State remains monolithic and its power a diffuse, Foucauldian nightmare of bland and banal repression.
Again, intentions are not the authors of effects: on the whole these writers, like Michael Dorland, demand of themselves and others more empirical investigation of such phenomena as "the beliefs, the reading habits, the intellectual and imaginative categories of the bureaucrats of Canadian culture" (p. 147); or "the marketing of shopping as theme park in Newcastle" (Frenkel, p. 189); or the resilience of quasi-mythical themes of Canadian identity in recent films celebrated for their genre-breaking authenticity or irony or postmodernity (Longfellow, p. 212); or "the hegemonic narrative of national art production found in Canadian art history and forming the basis of the National Gallery's permanent display of Canadian art" (Whitelaw, p. 133).
But these archaeologies of knowledge, in their collective as well as individual voices, inadvertently tend to emphasize the unilateral powers of the state and state cultural institutions. They do not develop analyses of the autonomous or semi-autonomous cultural practices that they might have, had they looked at, for instance, Canadian popular musics, craft, architecture, tourism - the whole slew of cultural practice that is not embossed with the official maple leaf and whose contingencies of production and distribution are determined by local and/or transnational economics to a greater degree. With the exception of Brenda Longfellow's essay, they do not venture far into the cultural industries of film, television, publishing, and recorded music where the mechanism of state-market collaboration is so important and so diffused throughout Canadian government structures and world markets. Citizens, or "cultural consumers," are largely absent, except in Vera Frenkel's account of her Newcastle installation project. It is possible while investigating national cultural institutions to lose sight of other modes of cultural practice, and the fact that hegemony is contested. Indeed, one can forget the power, even sanctioned power, of one's own critique.
Some of this tendency is mitigated by such essays as those by Thierry De Duve, Paul Mattick, Cheryl Sourkes, Bruce Barber, and Mark Cheetham, which cheerfully expose, in various ways, the longstanding romance of art and money and the hardheadedness of artists. These provide some of the unofficial spaces in which cultural nationalism has - like a gatecrasher at a party - to account for itself. In her concluding essay, Berland's co-editor, Shelley Hornstein, suggests that Canada has been a narrowly political space and that we must reconceive it as a hermeneutic space open to "as many conceivable and inconceivable imaginings possible" (p. 229). Yes, and as this collection shows, although we may think we know this to be a nearly impossible task in the light of state-centric cultural ideologies, our work and the work of those we study can show us otherwise.