Chairman of the Board: Paul Hoffert

Part 1 of 2

by Mark J. Jones

The Ontario Arts Council (OAC) made a significant decision in December of 1994 when its Board of Directors, then looking for a new chair, nominated Paul Hoffert. Hoffert, also director of the Cultech Collaborative Research Centre at York University, became the first chairman of any arts council to have a background firmly rooted in new media art, signalling an important sign of recognition from the OAC that techno-art was a field they were serious about accomodating in their system. Currently, there is no category for any artist in Ontario who produces work of multimedia, which affects funding and networking possibilities.

Here, in the first of an exclusive two-part interview, Hoffert talks about his new role at the OAC, its new directions, money (of course), and what new media artists can expect out of the new OAC.

Tell me about the new directions the OAC will be headed in and how your work with technology might play a role in that.

One [new direction] just has to do with process reengineering. We have begun a rather significant process reengineering at the arts council, which starts out with taking the initiative with the Metro Toronto and the Toronto Arts Councils to conform our databases so that if somebody had to apply to several of these organizations to get aid, we might move towards a common application form which would save people a lot of time, energy and money, cut the bureaucracy and allow us to share information which right now is not possible. We've actually been successful in getting a common data format and interchange process with the Metro and Toronto Arts Council and we have some discussions underway with the Canada Council. We're hopeful that they will agree to this as well.

Another level is the fact that whether this current Ontario government came to power or not, there is a general sense across Canada that the large politically-dense regions -- which, in the Canadian context would generally be thought of as Ontario and Quebec and in the Ontario context [would be] Toronto -- tend to control a lot of decision-making and concentrate resources. It's not a fact that I necessarily agree or disagree [with], but I agree that this is a perception. The OAC has been expending a lot of effort to make sure that we can communicate with artists and citizens of Ontario who are geographically disadvantaged by not living in downtown Toronto. In order to do so, there's no question that you have to look at technology as playing a major role.

A third area which the OAC is looking at -- and I believe is extremely brave -- has to do with the fact that this current board that I chair is a very pro-active board that is looking at the whole purpose of what an arts council is, [and] how that role is fulfilled in the best way we can. In order to do that we have to look at a lot of things. One is to look at the kind of projects which are coming to us -- and as usual the artists are way ahead of the average population in using new media. We have all kinds of world-renowned artists in Ontario -- I'll use David Rokeby as an example. Rokeby was trained at the Ontario College of Art as a visual artist who taught himself computer programming and programming which uses remote sensors to trigger music-generation. When he comes to the Ontario Arts Council for a grant, where do we put him? We've got the music stream, and the dance stream, and the arts stream, but how do you put together a jury of peers to evaluate all this [new] kind of work? We are committed to service all of our constituents -- and these are important constituents. We know from what comes in through the mail and over the phone that a lot of artists don't have the fear of the new technologies because they have very little to lose. It's not like they have an established business and if they go to new media they might lose customers or this or that, artists never have that anyway. They just look at this as a new kind of sandbox and tend use it in ways that were not necessarily imagined. So there's a real role for artists to play.

I think what you're gong to see is an increase [in] the process of bringing in these new media artists and asking them what they think is the most appropriate way of dealing with their needs. We actually don't really know. It's a tough call, a tough decision, and we've only gone as far as recognizing it, in terms of a board. For example, before I came on board, the Ontario Arts Council was much more adventuresome than, say, the Canada Council, in that we have programs which we award to rap artists, recognizing that what they do is somewhat poetry and somewhat music. And not all rap music is what we would consider a work of art, but within the genre we do consider that there can be art, just like in any of the other genres.

The board is also looking at the division of resources currently allocated almost solely towards money granting. We are considering assisting artists in the distribution and marketing of the cultural products, not just with their creation. I would say it looks like its going in that direction, and that's a big step for an arts council.

One of the reasons I took this job was because it was a wonderful, refreshing opportunity to implement many policies where a lot of the groundwork had already been laid. We started something two years ago called the Ontario Arts Council Foundation, which receives money directly from donors. Our largest donors were the Chalmers family who gave us about $10 million. This year the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, Hal Jackman, made a donation of $1 million. Other folks are starting to come out and offer some money to assist the arts, not to take the place of public funding, but as an opportunity to fund individual things that may never get through a government-audited kind of process. For example, Hal Jackman thought it was important to give an award every year to an arts organization which increased its audience. He allocates the money and the OAC administrates it. We're [also] looking at many ways to join the public and private sector in a continuum. We're looking at supporting the creators more and the beaurocratic systems less.

You know, a lot of folks have been asking me that, and to be quite honest I come to the new government both hopeful and with a very open mind. Of course, as with any organization that gets funding at a time when a new government comes in and says they're going to slash all government programs, we're very concerned that they may eliminate the Ontario Arts Council totally. But life is never in stasis. Things are always moving, you're always on the descendancy and ideas are always changing. So until I'm proved foolish for doing so, I am in fact optimistic that we can make our case to the government and that the government will support the Ontario Arts Council, not because you have to support the arts, but because it's good value. The citizens of Ontario will spend about $4.00 a year each on supporting about 4,000 initiatives that the Ontario Arts Council supports, ranging from community arts councils to the symphony to Stratford to individual artists.

[Now] granted, some individual efforts might very well cause a citizen of Ontario to write us a letter saying, "This is a load of crap, I don't want my money to go to this." But if we didn't do anything that didn't have some level as risk, then probably we shouldn't be funded as an arts council.

Every organization does it in a different way. We have a system I support very strongly, and that is that you have peer juries and you work very hard not to have the same people making the value judgements. We encourage our juries to be objective, of course, but they also have some opinions in the field. And so, we go out to the communities. I believe last year we had over two-thousand jurors from across the province from small and big communities come in and make the decisions about who would be successful and who wouldn't. I was very pleased with the turnover is of jurors, I believe it's in excess of fifty per cent every year. [Therefore,] we may make an individual decision that an individual or some number of Ontarions is not pleased with, but by-enlarge I believe that the process is very self-regulating.

We just got a very important survey released last month, showing that by and large Ontarions do feel they're getting good value for their cultural dollar, they feel that culture is very important to their communities whether they're in a large community or a small community.

In terms of multimedia, there was a different survey [which] was done in the [United] States, that was done to find out if there is a desocializing influence on young people with spending a lot of hours a week at a computer, I think it was 10 to 15 hours per week at least. [The survey found that they] went out to the movies and spent as much time with their friends as the kids who weren't doing that. In fact, the time that they were cannibalizing was their TV-watching time. The TV went down, but these kids weren't the unsocial, stereotyped nerds that you might expect. I think that's quite interesting. That is very tied into the research centre that I direct, which is interested in finding out about socialization, about privacy, about a lot of these people-oriented things which are connected with technology but tend to be thought of as very separate and sometimes very antagonistic.