BUREAUCRATS FORGET WEED'S INFLUENCE ON ART WORLD

Creative City Report Decidedly Uncreative

The Creative City Task Force released its Culture Plan for Vancouver
2008-2018 last month, entitled Creative City. If the document is
adopted by council, the plan will dictate the breadth and depth of
cultural investment by the civic government over the next 10 years,
and as a result, the quality of cultural life in the city for a long time.

For a report that uses the word "creative" 120 times in just 26
pages, there isn't much creativity in it. It is, to be fair, a
literary product of government bureaucracy, and so the report's
introduction by the Culture Department predictably brims with
literary gems like: "Staff will then use the consolidated
Implementation Plan to identify operational actions for the City to
be incorporated into annual workplans over the coming years."

Artists they are not.

Given the overblown statements in the report's introduction and
conclusion, what lies between is strictly processed meat. "Vancouver
is poised to establish itself as a city on the cutting edge of art,
culture, education, entertainment, and support of the creative
industries," the executive summary exclaims. Its hyperventilating
conclusion announces: "The arts and cultural sector has the potential
to create and capture a new energy which will come from within, form
new collaborations and relationships across the sector from the
local, national and international focus arising from a number of
extraordinary opportunities over the next six to 10 years."

Inside these statements, however, there is nothing more than plans to
build on this, expand on that, restore funding here, streamline
funding processes there. As for creativity in the Creative City
report, there is none. Nothing new is proposed. Vancouver's new
cultural plan, one meant to take the city over the cutting edge of
art and culture by exploiting extraordinary opportunities, is the old
plan all over again. Help the neighbourhoods do festivals a bit more,
reduce policing costs for events, streamline grant applications, get
the libraries and schools more involved, and so on.

The task force is right to sense the time is ripe for something
extraordinary in Vancouver. This has only a little to do with the
Olympics and much more to do with Vancouver's history. We tend to
forget, for example, this arts and culture hotbed is a direct result
of a relatively relaxed attitude toward marijuana consumption. If pot
wasn't readily available and smokeable out the back door, it's
doubtful there would be any musicians to play any neighbourhood venue
in the city.

The task force might have considered the historic and cross-cultural
link between toleration for marijuana consumption and the flourishing
of the arts, and made recommendations to the Vancouver Police Board
to instruct police to take an even more blind eye approach than they
already do. And it might have suggested instead of the usual pleas
for federal funding, another recommendation to press the feds to
decriminalize the clearly harmless substance.

The task force has also overlooked the obvious connection between
arts, culture and political activism. Yes, children cutting out paper
masks of mangled Olympic mascots looks like art, but nearly all adult
art has an overt political message fuelling it. Most artists I know
are politically active and make art as an integral part of their
political activism.

The task force has noticed that Vancouver has the highest per capita
population of artists in the country. But it doesn't stop to wonder
why. It certainly isn't for the glorious living standards available
to artists here. And most artists I know get over the mountains and
seascape pretty fast. That holds the attention of the hallmark card
painters and writers, but what attracts real artists to Vancouver is
the established history here of broad and popular political protest.
For the artist, it sometimes can feel like people in the audience are
listening and getting it.

But there is nothing in the report about that either. The words
"political" and all its variations, as well as "marijuana" and all
its aliases, fail to merit mention even once. The art and culture
envisioned by the Creative City report shall have no inspiration and
no purposeful expression. That is, it won't be art and culture at all
and Vancouver's moment will be missed.