Inside Vancouver
By Invitation
By Michael Harris published Jan 1, 2010
Facing massive cuts in funding, arts groups get creative
IT’S A FALL Friday, and a dozen people have laid down $150 each to attend a five-course dinner at the Baldwin House on Deer Lake in Burnaby. On hand are a pair of architects—one famous, the other not—and their spouses; writers and general culture vultures; and several people (including the cook) who have an intimate connection to Theatre Conspiracy, the group that invented the Secret Spaces Supper Club.
Each dinner, in a series of fundraisers for Theatre Conspiracy’s shows, takes place in luxurious surroundings; tonight’s is hosted in a modernist gem that Arthur Erickson designed for friends in 1965. The previous one took place in June at the B.C. Binning House in West Vancouver. Both events sold out, and not just thanks to the allure of meeting in precious homes to eat fine food. “We’re trying to be attentive to the notion that arts-going is a social experience,” one organizer explains. “Arts groups too often focus only on the performance aspect.”
The impolite subject of money does loom over the dinner table, though. The provincial government has recently announced its catastrophic cuts to the arts. In 2008/09, it doled out over $47 million; in 2010/11, the arts will receive a mere $7 million. “These cuts are devastating,” said the NDP’s culture critic Spencer Herbert, “and will throw the future of many organizations in the arts, culture, and heritage sectors into doubt.”
Decimating cultural institutions is not only impolitic; it’s highly impractical. Herbert noted that, according to the government’s own study, for every $1 invested in the arts up to $1.36 is paid back in taxes to the provincial treasury. Every other jurisdiction in Canada (including those with larger deficits than B.C.’s) have either increased or maintained their support for arts and culture.
Some cultural enedeavours can thrive independent of government support, of course. Several of those assembled around the long dinner table at the Baldwin House are capable of funding small arts ventures on their own. (There’s even some glamour in the silverware which, we’re informed, was once used by Mayor Gerald Grattan McGreer, who built City Hall.) The house itself is the only structure sitting on the water’s edge of the Deer Lake parkland and, as such, it calls up the value of private will in the midst of “public interest.”
