Today, Globe and Mail writer and novelist Russell Smith offers a rock-solid and highly depressing assessment of the recent sweeping arts funding cuts in Canada:
“It’s exhausting to have to have this argument year after year, from its very bottom up, the argument about why extremely wealthy nations should pay for the development and promotion of non-commercial art. It’s exhausting to have to explain to intelligent people – people who love travelling to Paris for the museums, Berlin for the architecture – the value of advanced intellectual inquiry that may not appeal to large numbers of people but which may well last for centuries. To have to explain that funding for arts must be administered at arm’s length from the political arena, so that a critical or provocative stance will not disqualify an artist from receiving support from the administration of the day. To have to explain once again that in fact much of the great art of the past was considered shocking or intolerable to community standards of the day. To have to show them the statistics for government arts funding from other Group of Eight nations.”
If you can handle even more bad news, read the entire piece: Extra! Extra! The arts don’t matter!
(Thanks to Catherine in the comments for the heads up on this one.)
heh, I read that today too, and immediatly posted on my blog. I wonder how many of us have reposted that one. *grin* It really was great.