Metropolitan Culture

We have a friend who once said that he would only really want to live in a metropolis, as opposed to a city.   Spending time in both Vancouver, which is a small city, and New York, which is a metropolis, I can testify to the difference.

The term "metropolis" comes from the Greek, meaning "mother city".   What we normally mean is a just a really big city.   What is significant for me is that these days it seems that only a metropolis can sustain larger scale artistic enterprises like symphony orchestras, opera companies, dance companies, art museums, etc.   In some cases, it is merely a matter of numbers.  If, say, one could think that maybe one out of one hundred people might have the inclination to attend a symphony orchestra concert, then a orchestra in a city of 500,000 people might have a pool of 5,000 possible attendees, while a city of 5,000,000 might have 50,000 possible attendees.  Which means that it is much harder for the city of 500,000 to have a functional orchestra.  Other factors, though, are equally significant, such as the level of financial support from governments, foundations, and wealthy individuals, and the sense in which the general population has been acquainted with the notion of enjoying the arts.   Furthermore, the presence of the media can play a significant role.   If the daily newspapers and television emphasize coverage of the arts, then that helps.
All of which is to partially explain why a city like Vancouver is barely able to sustain any form of  large scale cultural enterprise, and a city like New York sustains numerous forms.   In Vancouver, there are superb artists in all fields; but there are few chances for anyone to work in a larger scale.  Most of the cultural spaces in Vancouver are repurposed facilities; the main art museum/gallery is a former courthouse, the main concert hall a former movie theater with poor acoustics, and operas and ballet are performed (infrequently) in a 1950's general-purpose theater with terrible acoustics and poor sightlines. In Canada, both Montreal and Toronto have newly built spaces devoted to concerts and opera respectively.  In Vancouver, the provincial government spent 500 million dollars on a new retractable roof for an virtually unused sports stadium (without any public discussion). But since the 1950's, nothing has been built specifically for the arts.   The barely surviving local newspapers have virtually no coverage of the arts. The "entertainment" sections are mostly about Hollywood stars, etc.  The provincial government support for the arts is the lowest per capita in all of Canada, and most of the major corporations have their headquarters and focus elsewhere in Canada. And finally, the population is a heterogenous mix of immigrants from all over the world, which makes for a fascinating cultural melange, but does not make for a strong level of interest in the large scale European traditional forms of culture.  All of which to to say the major cultural organizations in Vancouver are struggling to survive (or have folded, as in the case of the major theater company).  (The artistic director of a major Vancouver arts organization once told me that his main goal as director was to make sure that his company survived.)  In Europe, of course, cities much smaller than Vancouver, such as Linz or Lucerne, can sustain larger cultural enterprises because of both government and popular support.  This, after all, is where all this large scale cultural stuff started.   Vancouver arrived to late in the game to even have any kind of collection of European art; the best museum is the Museum of Anthropology, which has a remarkable collection of aboriginal Pacific Northwest art.

All of which is to say that culture in Vancouver exists in small scale way, when people through extraordinarily hard work and enterprise are able to put together some wonderful events, in spite of all the obstacles that the cultural environment puts in front of them.  (A friend once set up a fund to support dance programs for more than one dancer after seeing so many choreographers reduced to producing solo shows for lack of money.)  And Vancouver does have a chance to be a laboratory for an experiment in determining what kind of culture emerges in a post-European world; what will emerge from this blend of people migrating from all over the world, each bringing with them their own cultures. (About 50 percent of the population of Vancouver does not speak English at home...)