The “Imbecile” Institution and the Limits of Public Engagement: Art Museums and Structural Barriers to Public Value Creation A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Jennifer Jo Budney © Copyright Jennifer Budney, March, 2018. All Rights Reserved PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis/dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis/dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis/dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Executive Director/Director of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis/dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis/dissertation. DISCLAIMER Reference in this thesis/dissertation to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the University of Saskatchewan. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not state or reflect those of the University of Saskatchewan, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this thesis/dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to: Executive Director/Director of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy Diefenbaker Building 101 Diefenbaker Place University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5B8 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies University of Saskatchewan 116 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada i ABSTRACT As sites for the promotion and contestation of ideas of beauty, subjecthood, and citizenship, art museums play an important governance role in liberal democracy. They are also a major source of expenditure for local governments, yet they often seem only marginally committed to contributing to the public good. While citizen participation in the arts has demonstrable public benefits, the art museum does not prioritize the kinds of services and activities that build public value. Instead, it caters to a small, liberal elite that in North America is shrinking both as a percentage of the overall population and in terms of real numbers. My research examines the structural barriers preventing art museums from adapting to their changing environments to create public value. I compare available evidence of the public value of arts participation as identified in the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project (2016) with data and evidence from North American art museums. I pay particular attention to the experiences and opinions of the art museum’s “front-line” workers, those who have daily contact with the public, through a survey with members of Canadian Art Gallery Educators and case studies at four Canadian art museums. I identify barriers to public value creation, including but not limited to: the composition of boards of trustees, hierarchical command-and-control organizational structures and functional departmentalization, staff demographics, the concept of artistic “excellence,” and the peer assessment process. I argue, on the evidence compiled, that the art museum is what Veblen (1914) referred to as an “imbecile” institution: one which, once entrenched, perpetuates its power so successfully that it seems eternal, inevitable, and right, even as it disserves the public. I also argue that to build public value, the art museum must dramatically restructure and re-orientate towards a radically democratic mission in which citizen participation and the educational function are prioritized. Finally, I contend that this can only be achieved by policy makers at all levels of government taking bolder steps to develop the art museum as an “agonistic” institution, discouraging the centralization of culture, and requiring greater diversity (both cultural and professional) on art museum boards, in managerial and creative positions, and in the assessment committees that evaluate the organizations. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my supervisor, Murray Fulton, who challenged me (relentlessly) to find the “interesting question” and provided astute and good- humoured guidance through every step of my Ph.D. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dionne Pohler, Josephine Mills, and Kathy McNutt, for their engagement, encouragement, and valuable feedback on several readings of this dissertation. Thank you also to Anne Whitelaw, for generously agreeing to serve as the external examiner at my defense. The Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy is an exceptional place to study, and I have learned from all the faculty. Rose Olfert and Brett Fairbairn provided me with important counsel and insights at different stages of my Ph.D., and I thank them particularly. I am also grateful to Amanda White, Clerical Assistant, and Amy Hassett, Graduate Student Advisor, for their expert and reassuring support. My Ph.D. has been supported through funding from the SSHRC Joseph-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Dean’s Scholarship, and other funding administered through the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Saskatchewan. My appreciation is extended to the executive directors and staff of the case study museums, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, and Art Gallery of Mississauga – I am inspired by your work. Thank you to the members of Canadian Art Gallery Educators who completed the on-line survey, to the three educators who spent a day with me discussing public value in advance of the survey, and to the other unnamed museum employees who took time from their busy schedules to be interviewed for this project. I am lucky to have many brilliant friends and colleagues with whom I have been able to discuss ideas related to art museums, cultural policy, and institutional imbecility. This research has been enriched by conversations in the past four years with: Wayne Baerwaldt, Lori Blondeau, Ruth Cuthand, Richard Davis, Andrea Fatona, Richard W. Hill, Candice Hopkins, Elwood Jimmy, Julie Kaye, Laura Kinzel, Rick Lowe, Melinda Mollineaux, Jeremy Morgan, Clint Neufeld, Sandra Semchuk, Franklin Sirmans, Haema Sivanasen, and Adrian Stimson. On his brief visit to Regina from the UK in 2016, John Holden, formerly of the British think tank Demos, graciously shared a meal with me and allowed me to pepper him with questions about public value and the arts. I thank Alexis Andrew and Michael Maranda for their most helpful responses to numerous queries regarding CADAC data. Thank you to family, biological and improvised, who have sustained me over the past four years. Their emotional and material support has ranged from taking care of my children and walking my dogs to buying me the laptop computer on which this dissertation was written, and much in between: Linda and Harold Kowalchuk, David Budney, Shaun Murphy and Paul Buffel, Travis Reynolds, and Alice Kuipers and Yann Martel. Most of all, I thank my husband, Richard Swain, for his constant encouragement (and everything else). iii DEDICATION To my children, Alexia and Julian, who are young enough to have no memories of their mother not doing her Ph.D. at the kitchen table. I love you. You can have the table back now. iv LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Characteristics of case-study organizations, 2016 ……………………………. 23 Table 6.1: Avenues for public value creation by art museums …………………………... 87 Table 7.1: Art museum educators’ perceptions of public value creation by activity ……. 90 Table 7.2. Educators’ perceptions of indirect public value creation by qualities ………... 92 Table 7.3. Feedback mechanisms used at Canadian art museums ………………………. 96 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Publication dates of significant critiques of art museum elitism and calls for democratization of the art museum mapped onto a timeline of income inequality in the United States (percentage of national income held by the top 1% of earners, 1913-2015): ……… 17 Figure 5.1: The “strategic triangle” (M. H. Moore 2012) ………………………………... 57 Figure 5.2: Competing Public Values (Talbot 2008) …………………………………….. 59 LIST OF APPENDIX TABLES Table B1: Art Gallery of Ontario Board of Trustees, June 2017 ………………………… 185 Table B2: Vancouver Art Gallery Board of Trustees, June 2017 ………………………… 186 Table B3: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Board of Trustees, June 2017 ………………... 187 Table C1: MacKenzie Art Gallery Board of Trustees, June 2017 ………………………... 188 Table C2: Nanaimo Art Gallery Board of Trustees, June 2017 …………………… …….. 189 Table C3: Two Rivers Gallery Board of Trustees, June 2017 ……………………………. 189 Table C4: Art Gallery of Mississauga Board of Trustees, June 2017 ……………………. 189 Table D1: CAGE Survey Responses