For fans of arts-community office politics, a dynamite story has unfolded in the eastern and national media over the past week.
It centres on the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and a power struggle among its top administrators.
According to the Federal Court of Canada, which released details of the feud last Friday, there have been firings, re-hirings, stress leaves and a computer load of incriminating and inappropriate e-mails.
One curator wrote that his colleagues were "a bunch of wankers."
The Ottawa Citizen tut-tutted on the brouhaha in an editorial Tuesday, saying the National Gallery appeared to have "a toxic work environment that even by official Ottawa's standards is ugly."
The story is instructive for several reasons. One of them, obviously, is "never type an e-mail you wouldn't want to see read aloud in a national courtroom."
But for Winnipeggers awaiting the construction of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, a few of the numbers being reported bear thinking about.
The Globe and Mail reported on Monday that the National Gallery's annual budget is $58.4 million. Of that total, $49.3 million comes from federal taxpayers.
That leaves another $9 million to be covered from various sources, maybe from Ontario and municipal Bytown taxes (though heaven forbid that Ottawans have to pay for any of their city's tourist attractions), private philanthropy and gallery admissions and other earnings.
In this context, $9 million seems like an afterthought, and perhaps it is when you are talking in Eastern Canadian terms.
But the figure is close to double the budgets of both of this province's top museums. The Manitoba Museum and the Winnipeg Art Gallery have managed to make ends meet, year after year, for about $5 million apiece, or about one-twelfth of what it costs to keep the lights on at the National.
Which isn't to equate them in other ways. Anyone who has visited the Sussex Avenue institution -- the Moshe Safdie-designed building opened in 1988 -- quickly sees that it exists on a different plane from anything we are accustomed to here.
Its rooms seem to go on forever, its individual exhibitions get royal treatment, and its collection houses Canadian and international masterworks.
Everyone recalls that 1980s purchase of American Barnett Newman's three-striped painting Voice of Fire for $1.8 million. But in 2005, the National bought a painting by Italian Renaissance artists Francesco Salviati for $4.5 million -- almost as much as the WAG's annual budget.
Of course, the National is hardly alone in operating on this scale. So do the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and they are dwarfed by numerous institutions south of the border.
Ottawa, remember, has three other national museums: the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Canada Science and Technology Museum.
As Crown corporations, all are similarly grand and operate on equally gargantuan (by Manitoba standards) budgets financed from the federal purse.
Which isn't to imply, entirely, that we resent paying for them. All countries need such symbols of high culture to burnish their international reputation and to serve and educate their own populations.
Putting them in the national capital makes perfect sense. And that's why the successful campaign led by Winnipeg's Asper family to attract a new national museum, the first outside the Ottawa region, is such an astonishing accomplishment.
The CMHR is still saying that the construction costs will be $265 million, with $100 million of that from the federal government. The operating budget, proposed at $22 million, will also be a federal expense.
It's hard to believe, given the current construction climate, that building costs will not rise. Maybe the operating budget will too. After all, $22 million is about a third of what those Ottawa national museums get (though it is four times as large as our provincial flagships).
There is a tendency here to be sheepish about such apparent profligacy. But whatever gets built -- and goodness knows the contents are still up for grabs -- will be modest by Ottawa's normal standards.
And because it will be part of Manitoba's arts community, which is one big happy family, it will have no office politics.
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
PREVIOUS
