Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Cultural system needs revamping
Canada's arts community needs to champion education and participation or risk further decline, a senior arts administrator told a Winnipeg seminar audience on Monday.
Simon Brault, the vice-chairman of the Canada Council and CEO of the National Theatre School, said that the old model of lobbying governments for increased funding based on the arts' economic impact is a doomed strategy.
"We need more popular support," Brault said. "Popular support is much less tangible but more powerful."
Brault, who is based in Montreal, was the keynote speaker at a day-long colloquium mounted by Arts and Cultural Industries Manitoba, a non-profit body that helps arts workers sustain careers.
Close to 100 senior arts administrators and bureaucrats took in the seminar, which was also attended by provincial culture minister Flor Marcelino and Liberal leader Jon Gerrard.
Everywhere in the western world, Brault said, arts funding levels have been in decline, as has been attendance at traditional fine arts events.
The only way to reverse these figures, he said, is to encourage participation in the arts, which will lead to more long-term public support.
"We need to rethink how our cultural system works," he said.
Prior to Brault's talk, there were presentations from Hamilton-based arts researcher Kelly Hill and Winnipeg economist Greg Mason, president of Prairie Research Associates.
Both men presented the results of recent statistical research that showed the significant impact of arts and culture on the broader economy.
Mason's research formed the basis of the Winnipeg Arts Council's Ticket to the Future document, released last November as the first phase in a plan to develop a new strategy for investment in the arts in Winnipeg.
The city has been designated Canada's Cultural Capital for 2010, a federal program that will see more than $2 million in arts programming unveiled in the coming months.
Brault put his paradigm-shifting ideas into a book published in French in Quebec last October. An English-language version, No Culture, No Future, is slated for May 29 publication by Toronto's Cormorant Books.
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 16, 2010 C3
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