We have a program called “So You Want To Be An Artist”. It's an online contest for youth that is slowly growing and one I'm particularly interested in. I think it's a great initiative. But we have a number of concerns in our field specifically. One is diversity. There is diversity in the Canadian art world, but it isn't really as reflective of the diversity in Canadian population as we would like. We would like to know why we have the same problem not only in art, but in art history as well. There's very little diversity in our schools in studying art history. In fact, there isn't very much gender diversity any more. It's mostly white women who are studying art history.
This is of concern to us in our field. This is also an issue in the United States, and we discuss this quite a bit among ourselves—museum directors at various conferences. We want not only that our organizations reflect the population in our country, but also we want to make sure that all Canadians feel that there are opportunities for them, particularly if they're very talented, in Canadian art, for them to participate and to represent not only themselves individually, but also their ethnic communities, as it were. So this is an issue we are grappling with.
Youth is also a big issue. One of our big problems, of course, is that art hasn't been digitized and it's not digitizable. So you can have a cultural experience with music that's complete through your computer. You can have a cultural experience with literature that's complete through electronics—I read mostly on my iPad now. It's the same thing with films, but not with art. You have to see the actual object, experience the actual video installation. It's not like a film. We've got sort of a lost generation in the visual arts, who have been fairly distracted by these machines they've grown up with, which are novelties in their family, etc. Art really isn't participating in the technological revolution, and we're having a really hard time understanding how it could.
So all these things concern us. But really, for the 150th, in reinstalling the Canadian collection, we have the general public and youth in mind, in that we want to simplify as much as possible the story we tell, and make it something you can learn very easily. We want to make it so that you can get a good sense of what the strengths of Canadian artists have been, what their participation has been in the history of Canada, and the meaning they have generated through the various generations, in ways that are easier to understand by a simple visit to the National Gallery.