Geof Glass: Art and culture create the spaces we live in

By Geof Glass

The B.C. government is cutting funding for libraries and the arts. Libraries suffered a 22 percent cut, while community arts, culture, and sports groups are facing cuts of close to 90 percent over the next couple of years. For the government, this is not a lot of money. For the groups and communities it affects, it is devastating. Meanwhile, in the face of intense controversy, the federal government is preparing new copyright legislation. It claims that this is economically necessary—and that it will be good for artists.

There is a glaring inconsistency here. True, the copyright lobby has tremendous political and financial muscle—the recipients of culture funding not so much. This explains the reality of the situation, but it also shows that we don’t really take culture seriously. All too often we treat it as a thing. Even artists sometimes fall victim to treating art as merely an economic multiplier. On one occasion while discussing copyright with a writer, I objected to his proposals because they would block the creativity of other artists and ordinary people. He replied that this really is not so important. “It’s only entertainment”, he said.

If we don’t take culture seriously, why do we care so much about it? Are we fools who fall for its empty allure? I don’t think so. We make a great error when we think of art as objects: this book, that song, that film. When we think of things alone as art, we mistake the map for the territory. And culture is a territory—sometimes one that is imaginary, sometimes one that is physical.

For the better part of a century, streets were seen as transportation: a way to get from point A to point B. Street improvement, in the language of engineers, meant making them bigger and faster. If you only look at the line on a map, this makes sense. But the path a person takes through a city is something else entirely. Great streets are not about moving from A to B at all.

In Morton Park, a sliver of grass at the corner of Denman and Davie, stands a cluster of huge laughing bronze statues by the artist Yue Minjun. There is no fence around them. Passersby walk around them and touch them, hold them arm-in-arm, pose crouching under the grinning faces for photographs. They are drawn in from the street. They relate to the art. They relate to each other. The street is not simply a thing. It, like the sculptures, is brought alive by the people who experience it. It is unpredictable. The line on a map reveals none of this.

Culture creates our streets. Public art is not alone: galleries, music venues, libraries, theatres, shops, and cafes all do this. These are cultural spaces. These spaces are diverse. The experience of them is unexpected. Each of us reacts to and cares about in our own way the art and spaces around us. This cannot be predicted from the objects themselves: the television shows, the posters, the novels, the tunes. The moment when art matters is the moment when it has a personal and unexpected effect.

But though that effect is personal, it is not solitary. It happens in a space shared by others: a space defined by culture. With the sculpture in the park this is obvious. The essential urban activity is people-watching: How better than to watch people posing for photographs arm-in-arm with imaginary companions? In these cultural spaces we express our diversity. This is not the same as the role we are obliged to take when we do a job, or commute from one place to another. When we occupy these spaces with other people we learn a little bit about who they are; they learn a little bit about who we are. Even when the space is virtual, the experience we have when watching a film or listening to a song is something we are conscious of sharing with others. We know that there is a link between ourselves and these strangers, even though we do not know who they are, even though we may be different in many ways.

Culture creates the spaces we live in. Many of these spaces are private and controlled. We live in secured condo developments, play in private facilities. We drive to work in individual cars. Many of us work with other people much like ourselves. This privacy has given us many forms of freedom and control over our own lives. That is good, but it is not enough. All around us are a diversity of people who we do not see in our everyday private spaces. And yet, though we may not know these people there is much we share with them. We share traffic and concerns about the education of our children. We share the environment and the economy. Things we care about, but that we cannot hope to change without these unknown others. We are already connected to these others; in the shared space of culture we can encounter them and gain respect for them outside the goals or conflicts of work or politics.

It is a mistake of thinking about art as things, about copyright as a way to make money, or about culture cuts as a way to save it. This habit of treating culture as things, like widgets or private pleasures, misses what really matters. The worth of art is not in its simple existence, or its quantity, or even in the self-expression of the artist. What I see in Minjun’s sculpture is not the grinning faces of the bronze statues. It is the grinning faces of the people around them. That is not something that comes from the art or the artist alone. It also comes from that particular placement—above all from the movement of people around it. For art to matter, it has to enter a shared space.

Our popular culture industries are tremendously productive. They produce an amazing quantity and quality of art that enriches our lives. Yet they have blind spots. They are centralized, taking advantage of great economies of scale (and so Hollywood recasts Vancouver as Philadelphia or Los Angeles). The stories they tell and the people they represent are crafted to reach the greatest number of people. And their means of distribution and consumption are focused on private consumption and controlled spaces, from cinemas and home theatres to ear buds and the radio on the drive to work. The spaces they create often do not connect us to others.

For us to have those shared spaces, we must take care to create them. Not all the places we live our lives are as fortunate as Denman and Davie. The tragedy of these cuts to culture, to sports, to libraries is that they strike precisely where we have the most need of it: the communities and places where a little bit can go a long way. Because what we value most in art is not the thing itself, but how it creates spaces for us to live in.

Geof Glass is a PhD student studying communication at Simon Fraser University, and a professional software developer.