Brault is a bureaucrat and educator from the performing arts part of the cultural spectrum. His positions and much of the anecdotal information in his book are understandably focused there. Since that is usually much less relevant to our concerns, I have focused on the elements that are more generalizable or specific to the visual arts.
As one of the country’s (and the province’s) leading cultural and educational bureaucrats, his book is worth reading for how much it says (or does not say) about what “culture” is or does. The book also provides one of the more thorough, if hardly rigorous, attempts to justify the existence of the cultural sector in decades, a justification that has varied little in the intervening half century since the beginning of its overhaul in the 1960s. Although it is a shallow defense, one which relies on circular arguments, appeals to authority, and evinces little substantive historical awareness, this also makes it an ideal expression of the bureaucrat consciousness that is basic to art discourse in the country.
The cultural sector is a term that embraces both the ostensibly commercial cultural industries (film, theatre, TV, music) and the seemingly non-profit ones (most visual art, performance art, etc.). There is substantial overlap between them both and neither are exclusive commercial nor non-commercial. Both also receive varying degrees of state and corporate funding.
With its title and its highly polemic opening and closing chapters, Brault’s book tends to stake its claims in borderline apocalyptic terms, assimilating it to climate crisis and the general collapse of society, hardly a rare strategy in the rhetoric of the sector. In more sober moments, he makes evident how clearly unnecessary the sector is, although he certainly does not concede it.
Unlike the way that international directors of cultural ministeries are sometimes known to behave, their Canadian colleagues are extremely practical and utilitarian in their outlook. As his opening gambit makes clear, culture is foremost a tool or strategy:
It is no longer surprising to see culture on the agenda at conferences of economists, sociologists, educators, advertising executives, accountants, urban planners, criminologists, or police officers. Indeed, the cultural angle is valued in broaching topics as varied as tourism, advertising, ecology and sustainable development, the fight against idleness and crime among youth, prevention of school dropouts, integration of immigrants, requalification of dilapidated neighbourhoods, improvement of intercultural relations in cosmopolitan cities, and affirmation of individual and collective identities. [1-2]
From the opening pages, he stresses that culture is a “strategy,” and one that by the turn of the millennium had become a highly lucrative one. As proof of this, he cites that attacks on its funding and power structures have aroused political backlash and were painted by culture’s exponents as part of a “hidden agenda.” If its critics were smeared in the vein of conspiracy theorists [state bureaucrats and the media are both “citizens” of the cultural sector and its dependents], its advocates overtly treated the cultural sector as a “lever for furthering development” [state expansion, tourism, etc.] both for economic reasons and in order to keep the sector within the norms of international trends to “creative cities.”
After the assertion of the major principles of humanism, we saw a kind of economic and social utilitarianism emerge and, more recently, the diversity of cultural expression was promoted. Each of these movements added an additional layer of discourse that today are part of the environment in which the cultural community in Canada is evolving. Here we are seeing, in fewer than ten years, an unprecedented multiplication of the programs and initiatives strong in cultural content not based on the long-standing principles of cultural policy and not under the governance of existing ministries, departments or cultural entities. The ministries that manage portfolios dealing with finance, education, tourism, housing, social welfare, and even justice and transportation are more interested in the impact of culture and are releasing funds to facilitate it. [54]
Interest in arts and culture became a “sudden craze” of governance, he suggests. [7] Although he does not really explain why this occurred when it did or spend much time acknowledging how fundamentally this mapped onto state doctrine and expansion starting in the 1960s, Brault concedes that there would likely be no, or barely any, cultural sector without extensive government incursion and action, whether in terms of funding or restrictive content laws. [31-32]
About 2 million Canadians have paid or unpaid jobs dependent on the cultural sector. This includes state bureaucrats, educators, libraries and archives, tourism, broadcasting, advertising, design, unions, associations, docents, “Hollywood North,” etc.. [26] 7.4% of GDP in 2007 was represented by the cultural sector (broadly speaking). [27]
Federal and provincial budget cutting in the late 1990s was partially compensated for by cities investing more in culture and subsequent substantial infusions of cash from the Liberals. Although there have been proliferating streams of arts funding over the past several decades from every level of government as well as the private sector, its advocates seem to exist in a perpetual mood of doom. For perspective, this is despite the fact that the National Endowment for the Arts in the US had a budget in 2005 that was proportionally ten times less than that of Canada’s Arts Council. [49]
As it existed at the time of his writing, only 20% of the 142,000 professional artists in the province earned more than $50,000 a year. However, because most artists in Québec have supplementary income from other lines of work, like teaching, their average income is around $38,000, significantly higher than that of the average worker in the province ($29,000). [39] Functioning as the edge of the middle-class, he observes that, “Culture is not a parasite of economic and social development, but can be a motor for it.” [11]
One thing that does distinguish his advocacy from earlier cultural debates is that while it may not be “elitist,” a term that he accords substantial dread as a moral ill [23], it is constructed with a very clear urban bias. He makes it clear that “culture” is the preferred term of bureaucrats and marketing people because it sounds “less elitist” than “art” but is still a turn-off to most people. [15] Throughout the country’s history of arts funding, one of the primary issues has consistently been decentralization and regionality, and one thing that Brault’s argument makes evident is a shift to a concentration on the urban (specifically Montréal) as a centre among international centres. This is in keeping with earlier forms of advocacy that we have encountered, specifically around the creation of a biennial for the city.
Hearkening back to the programmes initiated by Trudeau and Pelletier, Brault advocates for “cultural democratization” as part of urban development, something that is essential to the “urgency of tackling ‘re-enchantment’ of the world as the curtain falls on the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the jury is still out on the future of our civilization.” [9] It is a field determined by “more or less compatible” logics involving law, demographic management, and technology. [60]
We have been told that culture is a tool of governance, but what else is it? He explains that
I am not particularly fond of definitions, but am drawn to a sufficiently open and inclusive one that does not dismiss art, knowledge, scientific culture, and popular culture, all of which interpenetrate and influence each another. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the accepted authority when it comes to explaining the larger meaning of the word culture. It presents it as ‘the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.’ [18]
In line with this set of normative assumptions (which he repeatedly appeals to), he defines culture as the arts, the cultural industries, and heritage, but also as a “dimension of life” (values, pedagogy, social impact, etc.).
As much as culture always seems to be under threat (unsurprisingly given how little it is differentiated from general existence), art and culture are also defined as an “inescapable aspect of society’s development.” [8] He appeals to the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that asserted a right to culture. [41] What’s more: “Culture constitutes an essential dimension of our humanity in its individual and social expression. It is the key to three fundamental apprenticeships: learning to know, learning to be, and learning to live together.” [59]
Although it is the defining human feature that allows one to recognize what amounts to existence, the “cultural imperative” as an international trend is not a given but largely a result of “leaders,” and, as already indicated, a recent and peculiar phenomenon. This is part of why it tends toward elitism even if it is ostensibly open to all so “[e]veryone can participate in this movement to bring culture back to the heart of human experience.” This, he accords, a certain evangelical weight: “At a time when our only option is to think about the future of a civilization threatened by self-destruction, the consequences of this movement become even more significant. Battles for culture, education, the environment, peace, and social justice appear essential to re-establish the balance upset by the unchecked greed.”[8]
Absent from this utilitarian and moralized fantasy about “culture” is the clear historical fact that if there is such a thing (and even in anthropology it has been widely contested), it has always militated equally against rival cultures, the environment, peace, and social justice, and that -- even if one accepts the questionable self-definitions proposed by their advocates -- one can advance “culture” against any of these things as readily as for them. This is not simply to point out that “culture” as he employs the term is not as inclusive as he suggests but a highly artificial, ahistorical, self-serving moral claim for a particular style of governance and that his general argument is less about the future of culture than the future of a particular policing and deployment of it as a tool that reinforces and expands Liberal rule.
There is another interesting tension in the text. Although culture is defined as essential and inescapable, lurking continually within his narrative is the possibility of its disappearance. And just as culture is understood by him as something that exceeds its industrial and professional dimensions, its possible disappearance (and with it, effectively of the recognizably human) is something more substantial than the erosion of its dubious economy.
Also looming in the background is the possibility that art could endanger culture, that is, the essence of humanism. This is particularly evident in his anxiety around new technologies which he imagines may threaten the maintenance of the cultural sector. Artists are defined as people who “create content” or interpret it; they are presented as “adventurers” into the unknown, [33] the “exceptional” who speak to their contemporaries and are important because they “pose questions and suggest answers to our current existential or social questions.” [34] There is a particular irony in this humanist aversion to art’s radical autonomization given that one of his key examples for the function of culture is the Automatists, whose logic runs quite contrary to this, and whose history of reception shows the sector to be something of a clown show.
Part of the confusion created in the text is that he tends to employ several rather different uses of his primary term. Culture is defined effectively in a traditional art historical sense as the creation of forms and the skills associated with them, but also in an anthropological-sociological sense as values and as a form of intersubjective relationality, a social structure, and so on. So when he makes appeals to the ineluctability of one, it tends to suggest the same for the other, although the general narrative he constructs insists that the relation between the two is not a given or as much of a necessity as he wants to claim it is. Or, rather, if it is, it cannot be delimited in the way that he intends, that the cultural sector itself not only has no monopoly on culture, but that culture does not need the cultural sector any more than art does.
The central point of the book then is not so much about culture but about preserving the notion of art and culture that has been historically privileged by Liberal government, namely along an expressivist line when it is not primarily about the aesthetic experience of the audience and its function as part of a social processing.
The book continues what has since the mid-1960s, been the primary moral argument for Liberal governance, the maintenance of culture as “The inalienable right to culture that justifies government involvement often remains theoretical. I commented on the dangers of a subsidized cultural system that only encourages excellence and a wide array of artistic production to the point of almost forgetting to develop the demand. The great principles of cultural democracy had to be brought back to the forefront, and quickly.” [12] And it was precisely this critical difference that distinguished the suggestions of the Massey-Lévesque Commission from the policies enacted by subsequent Liberal governments, both in the province and the country more widely.
In practice, this has meant in part an increased stress on process over product, cultural events, and policies used to “sensitize” people to culture. The task of the Canada Council was to make culture part of daily life and more inclusive; a way of “legitimizing” something that was marginal. [16] “We had to promote a utopia just as essential to our community life as the idea of justice: culture for all.” [17]
In line with this utopian aim, culture is treated as one of the primary factors of “civilization and progress.” [61] It also “serves as bait for consuming a vast number of products and services, not to mention that the cultural products themselves are for sale and sometimes expensive.” [62] Acknowledging this, he adds that it is not just something bought and used to sell, but at its best encourages reflection on “oppressive reality” and as things in which we seek to see ourselves reflected. [62]
More sympathetic to a universalist and evolutionary line of cultural development that stresses hierarchy of quality, [66] he contrasts with a relativism that promotes the local but is also highly populist and commercial. He does not attack relativism and promotes a third way that is effectively, “elitism for all.” Brault uses the term “participation” rather than consumption/production to describe cultural activity. [72] This activity is linked to emotional issues, political values, self-esteem, etc. Libraries are at the forefront of cultural democratization, increased stress on the arts as sets for people to participate in where this participation is more important that the artist or artwork themselves. [79-80] The future of institutions depends upon this democratization. [81] This democratization also justifies the subsidization of culture, which is otherwise elitist. Cultural participation is intended to serve as a means of developing the artist in everyone, a contention that necessitates reducing it to a socialization process. [82] The privileging of urbanism, like that of artist run centres, is the privileging of a particular use of the state as both institution and medium: “Big cities have now become immense open-air laboratories where people experiment with prototypes of social re-engineering. Some of them are called upon to play a key role in reconfiguring fundamental cultural dynamics.” [84]
You could argue, I certainly would when it comes to the visual arts (theatre no doubt is different), that urbanism is an antiquated and reactionary concept, that it would be better to ruin the cities than to reinforce them. Besides which, it has been the case that the majority of strong artistic work that circulates in the city is made by people who were not “cultivated” by it, did not come from it, and tend to leave it. It is far more convincing that disgust with urbanism, detachment and alienation from it, have been more productive in terms of the art of the past century than the participatory reflex. This is no great surprise since the “democratization” of art as culture, the transformation of the urban environment into a kind of massive mall or theme park as envisioned by Yves Robillard and other advocates of Contemporary Art since the late 1960s, has made art even more kitsch than it was under the church. It is in keeping with the desire for culture to function as participation and this is not reducible simply to a more consumer-focused model but is also an avowedly political activity.
A great deal of the general argument relies on platitudes along the lines of “We live in an increasingly complex and changing world.” [8] These sorts of statements are offered but he then ignores that the shifts that he describes have not been part of some organic global phenomenon but have been artificially implemented, and certainly in the Canadian context, largely state-planned. The book is organized around avoiding complexity and, when that does not work, arbitrarily opting for the illusion of “openness” for definitions of terms and claims on undefended moral grounds. This should come as no surprise given that the book not only correctly understands “culture” as a governmental tool, but also as a technique for “enchantment” and utopian fantasy. The commitment to culture is one to essential falsity and this is central to the state's practice of art.