Blog | We are in a State of Fracture Rather Than Mosaic

This blog serves as a follow-up to the Cultural Policy Hub’s recent panel on social cohesion and cultural policy at the 2024 DemocracyXChange. Panel participant Victoria Kuketz, who works as the Director of Corporate Engagement at Catalyst, is a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum, and hosts the Democracy Dialogues at the Democratic Engagement Exchange, was invited to reflect on some of the key questions and issues that were raised during the discussion.

What happens when the arts and culture become a politically polarized issue? What does this mean for the future, and what conversations and changes would be needed to shift this dynamic?

Every sector, every organization and every household in Canada is grappling with a common challenge: polarization. And the arts are no different—not just in effect, but also as a target. From declining state support of the arts (due to the perception of the arts as a hot-bed for progressives) to declining patronage overall, we urgently have to remind ourselves of the central role of the arts, and the arts community itself, in understanding who we are and what we stand for personally, so that we can have a better and more empathic understanding of who we are collectively. Now more than ever, we need that vision.

Recently, I, along with Sarah Garton Stanley/SGS, Tanya Talaga and Kelly Wilhelm explored affective polarization’s damaging effect on the arts at the 2024 DemocracyXChange conference. Wilhelm laid bare the crux of the issue by stating:

“In Canada, one of the main rationales for public investment in the arts and culture sector has historically been their ability to contribute to social cohesion, representing Canadian identity to one another better across our different cultures, and over a massive land mass directly north of a powerhouse cultural producer, the United States. Today, it is clear that the arts and culture are seen by many not as a way in which Canadians can participate in and know their country, and one another, but an exclusive realm only for progressive elites.”

Meanwhile, SGS and Talaga offered powerful insights from the leadership, expertise and lived experience that each of them brought to the conversation. Among other frank commentary, Talaga offered that the “shared” narratives we recall and inclusions we connect around were never inclusive of Indigenous communities.

I come at the challenge of polarization from the lens of a public policy researcher, corporate advisor and community builder. As a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum, I spent much of 2023 leading a nationwide study of how polarization was manifesting in Canada called Far and Widening: The Rise of Polarization in Canada. In running this diagnostic, we engaged with communities across the nation by listening to as many as we could from grassroots community organizations to classrooms, researchers, city builders, sitting politicians and journalists from over 320 Canadian cities. Amidst our stark findings, one thing was clear: our narratives, our representations, our descriptions and, quite frankly, the ways we describe ourselves and each other need an update. They need a reimagining, or a “refounding” as Political Scientist Rob Goodman refers to in his book Not Here: Why American Democracy Is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself. [1]

For example, our national survey revealed that just 37% of respondents only moderately understand the left-right scale in relation to political beliefs—which raises the question of how Canadians really define themselves politically, and how they are experiencing and discussing the current political and cultural atmospheres. Times and people have changed; we need to tell these stories and visualize Canada in 2024 into being. This kind of creation can be an act of unity.

Where do we go from here? What are we trying to achieve?

We have to ask the question: do we have a shared vision and understanding of our Canadian national identity? Or are we in a state of national and cultural fracture rather than mosaic? How is this affecting people?

We are seeing increasing loneliness and isolation (as shown in the 2024 Toronto Vital Signs report), polarized politics and communities, as well as backlash against the very notion of inclusion and other forms of social discord. So, we need to explore what role arts and culture can play in helping us imagine and co-create a “new national community,” as Benedict Anderson writes in Imagined Communities.

In order to push towards an updated and representative vision for Canada with integrity and courage, we will need to use the same tools that artists and cultural producers employ: our imagination, formation of community, and individual expression coupled with principled co-creation. Taking the data and lessons learned from the Far and Widening study, here are some recommendations for pathways forward:

1. More accessible third spaces: People need to be invited to participate and be meaningfully engaged in dialogue and public life when it comes to arts, culture and politics. The Public Policy Forum’s research revealed that Canadians are not apathetic: rather, they have been excluded and disengaged from conversations that affect them the most. In fact, our data revealed that people are deeply motivated to have conversations about issues and challenges impacting their lives. While this is vital, there are few safe spaces where these conversations can happen as people’s views on the issues facing us grow increasingly polarized and tolerance for diverging opinions is on the decline. Third spaces can be as simple as the community roundtables we organized in the PPF project or an interactive work of public art that connect us to one another.
   
   There needs to be discussion on the way Canadians see things. Art allows us to explore and depict Canadian identities and perspectives. It’s one way we can better understand one another and express how we understand the world around us.
   
    
2. Promote arts patronage as a civic responsibility: Whether it’s the ideal way forward or not, corporate citizenship plays a pivotal role in a healthy and vibrant cultural sector. It helps create the financial and social conditions for creativity and the weaving of social fabric and has become absolutely essential for the sustainability of the arts. Corporate Canada must double down in times of polarization and not abandon its commitments to the arts. The findings from the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer cites corporations as being the most trusted among all institutions. So, corporations must “loan trust” to the creative sector, rather than considering abandoning their commitment due to misplaced worries around the possibility of controversial and potentially polarizing forms of artistic expression. After all, as historian Gary Gerstle wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: “Every political order contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among constituencies that it must manage” and corporations, like all of us, must continue to navigate this “uneasy co-existence” of “different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life.”[2] Catalyst, a global not-for-profit focused on gender equity and the future of work, offers practical and concrete conversation guides like this one called “Flip the Scripts”: these guides allow us to navigate sensitive and controversial topics rather than shut down dialogue.
   
   We also need to prize art as a mechanism for learning, connection and intercultural awareness, rather than just entertainment. As Josh Tillman, (aka Father John Misty) once said, “entertainment is about forgetting about your life, and art is about remembering your life.”[3] Here, I think Misty is close, but I would say art also offers us the modality to imagine and reimagine our lives, too.
   
    
3. Empower artists as community leaders: Artists and cultural producers are uniquely positioned to provide education, resources, mentorship and platforms for community leadership, interconnection, collaboration and advocacy. After all, when cities go through an arts and culture renaissance, they become more attractive places to live. We should be recognizing and rewarding the kind of artistic leadership that leads to innovation and economic development, rather than allowing the politics of resentment and polarization to creep in. Indeed, artistic expression can contribute to a community’s voice, create a foundation for dialogue and function as a basis for reimagining who is a part of that community.

We need more collective imagination. We need every sector and every community to participate. We need the arts to visualize it and call it into being. As I said earlier, creation can be an act of unity. When Lyndon Johnson (a polarizing figure himself) enacted The Arts and Humanities Act in 1965, he said: "Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”[4] So, my question to all of you is: How do we take the current state of society and impact on the arts from a place of fracture to a place where these broken pieces can come together and form a new cultural mosaic? The pieces don’t have to fit together; they can tell a new story that represents all of us and where we are at. These stories and works of art will be forged in our communities, in our schools and across our great nation.

The Cultural Policy Hub and the Public Policy Forum will continue to work on this policy issue. We are building a community of practitioners—artists, arts organizations and membership organizations, researchers, and policy-makers—to work with us. Please reach out if this is of interest to you.