Auditing Edmonton’s Cultural Capital

“I should go, really I should… but it’s just so…”

“… it’s daunting, you know?”

“I don’t feel comfortable or welcome.”

The past week I’ve been talking with Edmontonians about their willingness to visit and participate in what we might call the city’s major cultural institutions such as the Winspear Centre, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the Citadel Theatre. The quotes above are a few of the answers I’ve received. They seem somewhat innocuous in a point of time where visitor numbers are high. It’s clear, however, that while attendance may be up, inclusivity and broad community access remain elusive.

To a certain extent, this is the same old song and dance. Institutional critiques have long been a motivating factor for changing curatorial strategies, museum stewardship, and the ethical commitments of arts organizations to the communities around them. Fred Wilson suggested that the histories and narratives of oppressed peoples were problematically excluded from the presentation of high art and cultural artifacts when he juxtaposed slave chains with plantation silverware. The Situationist International suggested that institutions were problematically removed from their communities by proposing to blast a holes in museum walls and build labyrinths inside. Hans Haacke suggested that galleries were not the neutral custodians of art that they presumed to be by exposing the politics and business interests of the immensely influential but often invisible board of directors as the subject of his art.

All these points are well taken, and should be taken further. However, even if we manage to get the content of cultural institutional right, there remains a larger problem, which is simply getting everyone through the door. Patronage to these places is overwhelmingly correlated with membership to middle to upper economic, educational and social status groups. Why is this the case?

There are many answers, and many responses. Firstly, the monetary cost of admission is certainly a factor, though there are now ways to get around this barrier. You can get tickets to the symphony for $20, the Citadel does rush seating, and the AGA has free access nights. Secondly, the content of these institutions might be seen as being abstruse, but this is also changing. Despite the complaints of cultural purists, the orchestra’s playing Disney, the art gallery’s exhibited Warner Brothers cartoons, and the theatre’s showing The Sound of Music. It’s hard to find a program without something that might be seen as a populist gesture. Thirdly, and supposedly, it’s not even the architecture anymore. The classical temples, opaque and poised upon stone pedestals apart from the bustle of the street, have been replaced with glass walls, public atriums, and assorted shops and cafes in an attempt to serve the public as purveyors of both high culture and low consumption. As sociologist Nick Prior suggests, you can have one’s Tate and eat (in) it too.

And yet, if my conversations on the street are anything to go by, something is left out of this account- something less easily quantifiable and more in the realm of subconscious impressions. Something, I think, that might be better explained by an appeal to the aesthetic experience of cultural capital.

By this, I don’t mean cultural capital in the same sense that Edmonton was Canada’s Cultural Capital of 2007, though that vague designation was pleasing. This kind of capital, as developed by Pierre Bordieu, is a kind of personal commodity just like economic capital. We ‘buy’ our admission into cultural institutions and the comfort we experience therein through the capital we inherit from our parents and nurture in our education. We can trade this capital for social prestige and economic advancement (which gives a whole other spin on philanthropy and wage-work in the arts sector). It’s the subtle ownership we experience or lack in our dealings with culture, and it varies between institutions and people. It’s the difference between ignoring a security guard and feeling scrutinized by his gaze. It’s the facility to which you feel involved in a community instead of nervously visiting. Cultural capital, I would suggest, is what needs to be audited in our institutions if we are to account for the failure of inclusivity.

So how are our institutions doing? To pick on the shiniest elephant in the room, the AGA has some real problems. Rather than conveying a sense of openness and inspiring futurity as promised, Randal Stout’s architecture seems to suggest most predominantly an aesthetic of hygiene. The steel and glass of the building seem hostile to the bodies of its visitors, showcasing the smudges of fingers and the clamour of footsteps somewhat accusingly. Ever present security and a lack of seating discourages visitors from lingering too long, while the absence of participatory art displays breed passivity and disengagement in those without the educational foundations in visual literacy. The comfortable dinginess of the Enterprise Square location is sorely missed.

More problematically, I would suggest, is the management of event spaces in the gallery. I am incredibly annoyed when I interrupt wedding photos by simply I climbing the public staircase, and I feel like an intruder when I open the doors to the building and am immediately greeted by a roped-off corporate function. The fracture of public and private space makes the AGA an exclusive rather than inclusive venue and raises the cultural capital requirements immensely. It would seem that the gallery’s contract with Compass Group has effectively stifled the promise of the New Vision campaign to transform the AGA into a public meeting place. You can meet there, but only for a very premium fee.

But the AGA isn’t the only culprit here. The Winspear Centre locks up during the day, stopping countless curious pedestrians at doors they can peer through but not enter. Even Latitude 53, ostensibly a community-centric organization, can be off-putting when it hosts fashion events and stylish fundraisers for its ever-trendy hipster audience. Almost everywhere, the graffiti of the philanthropic class is widespread phenomena. It seems somewhat at odds to think of it as My Winspear when Enmax, Telus and many affluent individuals have their names on the wall or on my seat. Likewise, it’s youraga but it’s Ledcor’s theatre and Ernest J. Poole’s gallery. Finally, rigid dress codes, disengaged staff, and the absence of queer, immigrant and aboriginal voices on administrative teams are pervasive and surefire ways to make an unwelcoming experience at any institution. All these factors raise the cultural capital required to enter these spaces comfortably. They present very real barriers to institutional accessibility that need to be addressed in tandem with economic and programming concerns.

At the same time, I don’t want to naively declare that these problems are easily or completely fixable. Many of the factors that contribute to cultural capital come from funding demands, which are only likely to intensify in the coming years. You can’t ask for something out of nothing, least of all in the arts, and it’s a fine line of balancing different capital requirements to satisfy as many people from as diverse backgrounds as possible.

One space where I see some encouragement- one institution where cultural capital requirements are remarkably low- is the public library. The EPL does a fabulous job providing content and programs for hugely varied groups of people in an environment that is both welcoming and inclusive. The interiors are warm and homey instead of cold and sanitized, and patrons have an opportunity to effectively curate the content they interact with. I think some interesting things might happen if we began to think of our institutions as cultural libraries rather than museums.

At the very least, we should endeavour to bring the wider community into our cultural spaces, rather than forming communities out of the few that make it through the door.