After 20 years working in Canada’s cultural sector, I can finally speak out without fear

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Kelvin Browne is a former vice-president at the Royal Ontario Museum and the former Executive Director and CEO of the Gardiner Museum

It’s not like I’ve retired and finally get to tell off my boss with impunity. Rather it’s a relief after 20 years as a culture worker, first at the Royal Ontario Museum and then at the Gardiner Museum, not to mention a lifetime making a living in creative endeavours, to be able to venture a contrary opinion and not worry that I’ll lose my job. Or ask a sincere question and not be labelled an oppressor, colonial or otherwise, misogynist, transphobe, right-wing bigot, or capitalist sellout by those who disagree with me. There’s a long list of scarlet letters that brand you as unacceptable in the cultural world.

My story is based on personal experience but typical of many you hear. But of more concern is not the narrow range of what art administrator types like me can say and do, but the creative latitude and opportunity to shock us with the new we allow artists in this context. The art critic Harold Rosenberg’s 1965 essay The Anxious Object discussed art objects that were anxious because they weren’t sure they were art. Ten years later, Tom Wolfe’s book The Painted Word had a similar notion that it wasn’t what you were looking at that mattered, it was what was said about it. Art was art, much like Duchamp’s signed urinal, because it was deemed to be. Today, an artwork’s authenticity is often connected to the artist’s identity and its correspondence to the narrow range of topics cultural influencers feel relevant, for example, gender issues, victimhood of various varieties, and climate change.

Unique or brilliant expression is secondary to checking a lot of other boxes first. When culture is in a very tight box, anyone thinking outside of it doesn’t last long. I’m not suggesting there’s a cadre of repressed Jordan Peterson artist clones out there but rather the homogeneity of belief in the cultural sector, i.e., group think, that borders on a cult. I’m old enough to remember when you expected artists to be different, outside societal norms, non-conformists, certainly not saintly or concerned about much other than their art.

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Especially if you lead a cultural organization, you must be careful about what you say as your words can have outsized consequences. It’s one thing for a disinhibited rant at dinner to go viral and get you ghosted by friends, fired, or cancelled by the world, but much worse when you take your organization down the rabbit hole of perceived non-virtuousness with you. Donors seldom continue to support the tainted and sponsors don’t relish a boycott because they didn’t stridently disassociate themselves from a suddenly less-than-perfect institution.

For instance, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston collaborated on a Philip Guston exhibition to debut in 2020. Included in the show were paintings that had cartoonish, hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, an exploration of racism by the renowned artist. The show was delayed, there was wide community consultation of those thought potentially harmed by the exhibition or its interpretation, trauma specialists were consulted and the show reorganized eventually so viewers could bypass those potential troubling images. Some felt it was the museums that were traumatized by the fear of showing provocative work that might brand them and their sponsors as less than progressive.

There are fewer examples of exhibitions that cause sponsors to leave than one might assume because if there’s a threat of this, or the potential of public discontent, the show doesn’t happen. More often it’s the sponsors that don’t survive scrutiny, like Scotiabank and the Giller Prize.

In a museum, one unacceptable artifact on display or without the correct and/or apologetic label and the internet mob is on you. In a museum, one seeming innocent artifact on display can become an incendiary for those who want to find institutional fault. I recall a tiny Commedia dell’arte Harlequin figure at the Gardiner Museum that can be read as being in black face but did not have the explicit intention of representing black face – I’m sounding like a curator. It had been innocuously on display for years and then suddenly prompted intense curatorial discussions and emotional commentary. We wanted to do the right thing but I had the sense it was in some people’s interest to doubt our goodwill and focus more on the crime of displaying the object at all or when it apparently had inadequate labelling, ie., didn’t discuss possible racist subtexts of these kind of figures.

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It’s remarkable how many who join these virtuous witch hunts aren’t directly acquainted with the grievance that prompted it. Of course, whoever is being hounded is wrong and any explanation is considered obfuscation. Working in the cultural sector is unsafe except those unassailable because of their race, sexuality, community (religious or otherwise), gender, or totally immune to criticism because of a combination of these prophylactics. Ferreting out non-believers is a noble calling as there is no such thing as ambiguity for this bunch. For the most strident it makes for a good consulting business, guiding the unindoctrinated to the safety of progressiveness. I’ve hired a few of them.

I never had to take a stand when an online battalion stormed an institution as former colleagues have had to when they’ve found an artist or speaker they are hosting once had an incorrect opinion in an e-mail, has an aggrieved former girl or boyfriend adept at online coercion, been found guilty of using the wrong pronouns, and so on. This is a mysterious enterprise when the inquisition focuses on dead artists. For instance, Picasso, by contemporary standards is often considered a misogynist because of his assumed manipulative relationships with women – especially those much younger than him. Similarly, William de Kooning, in particular his Woman series with its grotesque female images, angered many with what they saw as sexism and aggression toward women. (De Kooning said the paintings had to do with modern anxiety, not a personal problem with women.) Do we judge the artists’ lives before we show their art? Do we need to have labels that comment on the lives of artists as a permit to allow viewing? I know a few curators who are nervous about exhibiting Picasso or de Kooning, at least without a disclaimer.

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But like some of my colleagues, I had people question whether it was proper to show an entire category of objects because they were created by a class, for instance, in 18th century England, where wealth in that society could be connected to exploitation if not slavery. But I came to realize most anything could equate with harm. I had a museum visitor berate me because we were exhibiting objects by a man and this was apparently reinforcing the continued subjugation of women and diminishing the prospects for female artists (although I think she may have said women and non-binary artists). I learned to take these kinds of comments, once dismissed as inconsequential, seriously and be cautious how I responded. Most visitors carried a weapon, a cellphone, and one negative post could trigger an avalanche of trouble.

Now that I’ve left that world, my relief is not that I get to be flagrantly right-wing, because I’m not, but instead that I don’t have to rigorously self-censor. As well, I no longer must endure the self-appointed cultural police who adjudicate the thoughts I’m permitted to vocalize. “Why should we hear any more from you?” I was told in a cultural organization meeting years ago. “You’re just an elite, entitled white guy.” The woman denouncing me had several of the requisite identifiers which permitted her imperiousness. She, and the others around the table not disputing the comment, were equally as entitled as me, I thought, but I apparently looked more entitled.

“I’m not entitled ... I’m a bullied gay guy who managed to succeed in the straight world,” I responded. That got a snort of laughter. It was later explained to me that I could never compare my struggles to hers. For starters, she was a visible minority, as if being an effeminate gay boy growing up in a rural community wasn’t. I got used to hearing words and phrases like intersectionality, systemic unconsciousness racism, settler mentality, microaggression and ingrained white privilege, and felt smug that I subsequently avoided being the target of these barbs by keeping my head down.

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I believe I was a progressive type. I wanted to be inclusive. I wanted to help people who had a difficult time – for one reason or another – get started in the cultural world or be recognized so they felt equal and worthy to others in the community. I tried to reach out to diverse communities not comfortable with traditional institutions, and ... a long list of other well-meaning ambitions. Maybe I was a Christian trying to make the world a better place, but I’d never say that. Then I realized I was always going to be wrong, somehow. Remaining silent was safe for me and the organizations where I was employed. And I did even when there were people who were clearly paying for the sins of their ancestors or unintended consequences beyond their control, including having graduated from a prestigious university. I should have spoken up.

While I learned to say nothing out loud, I continued to have transgressive thoughts. In one training session, we began by confiding to the group what our pronouns were. Instead of he and him I wanted to insist on “sir” or “Mr. Browne” as monikers. (This is how my generation used to address older people they respected.) Needless to say, I didn’t blurt this out.

The cultural world is full of enforcers in 2025: art schools, universities, arts associations and, most brutal and rigid, provincial and federal funders. All conspire to instill proper thinking. If you’ve applied for government grants you know that culture money is a not so subtle animator of social policy objectives. If you want government money, you twist your art to fit their agenda. Much of what is produced in this manner alienates and produces cynicism, not just for a mainstream audience but for complicit culture workers.

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Maybe the culture world needs an existential crisis to push us from so-called Canada to patriotism. One that moves culture from an exclusionary ideology that needs to keep finding people and ideas to disenfranchise or to be superior to ... to what I’m not sure. Unsettling ideas are the raw cultural edge artists used to embrace; few sought the safety of consensus. This volatile, uncensored realm, not managed by academics or bureaucrats, can perhaps once again offer the possibility of revelation.

Maybe a new generation of curators and administrators will better separate art from advocacy. In my postretirement life, I’m returning to my teenage ambition to be an artist. I have such old-fashioned ideas about art I’m likely not going to provoke anyone, but I’d hope I’m encouraged by whoever runs museums to do just this.