CopyCat

While looking over notes for my presentation at one of the CECC's Cultural Research Salons last January, I happened to focus upon one thread of the presentation that I wish to explore now in more detail; the apparent parallels between my ideal of how cultural communities would proliferate and my sense of how business communities operate under  globalization. 

Business tends to run the table, to dictate it's own means of survival. A deregulated market, wherein one is free to scribe one's will, etc... these are the preconditions that have been recreated across the world with the advent and continual reinvention of ever-more detailed economies. But the interesting thing is how business culture has created its own support mechanisms; Government lobbies, schools and training institutions, self-regulation councils; all a diaspora of bureaucratic organizations that create a mosaic, effecting the business world as precisely that, an entirely separate, if parallel, realm. 

The argument is that this kind of approach lends weight to a certain work ethic, while advancing the social field as a whole. That it generates individuals of leadership and vision. That it is a terrifyingly organized mechanism without having the waste and inefficiency of a top-down deliverance. 

This unique pairing of deregulation with a diverse support network seems, at surface, desirable, and a possible avenue to pursue for cultural infrastructure. Perhaps it is just this type of program that has made certain other cities so successful (Of course, this predicates a visionary, fearless leadership, something we have flirted with but failed to embrace wholesale).

It occurs to me that one aspect of this, the contemporary art world, has already traveled this path. Big money rules its predilections. It has presumed and initiated several self-defense mechanisms, or appropriations, in order to position itself as legitimate, vital, necessary.  It is ruthless, holding no loyalty but its own longetivity, as a system. 

The concern, however, lies in the leap to embrace this methodology while knowing full well what it is we are aping. Should cultural communities and infrastructure for art mimic the techniques of a profit-driven system? What is compromised in exchange for the mantle of 'efficiency' et al? What possible ways of organizing - ones that may play more to our strengths - are abandoned? 

The issue at hand then, is what are these alternatives? There is a wealth of thought that has been written and presented around cultural organizing, in (and about) Vancouver and beyond. Yet, it is currently diverse, separated, at odds with itself. It respects cultural relativism, and as such must pay homage to tenets that would keep it alienated. 

It is akin, I believe, to choosing an open-source platform, compiling it from source, and running a minimal operation versus using a simplified installation wizard to run a flashy, commercial program. 

The problem is that there will ever be a definitive choice; it will always be replicated and redone, and their pr machine is much bigger than ours...