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Marni Soupcoff called for the elimination of the artist grant system earlier this week and there’s been an expected response.

There are two types of artist I know: those who love the council-system and those who dislike it for encouraging ’safe’ work.

I’m of the latter sort. My feelings are that the council system is made up of juries who are into one particular type of art. So, the assumption being that if you’re a painter specializing in the type of portraits and landscapes appreciated by grandmothers, you don’t have a chance of getting a grant. The so-called ’safe’ work is whatever’s hip, and that’s impossible to pin down from year to year: it’s a fashion, it moves through communities as people imitate one another, it’s original source unknown and unimportant. In today’s globalized culture, the determination of what’s hip is dominated by bigger players, and is probably documented and originated in magazines like Artforum rather than C Magazine. (That’s a specifically visual-arts reference. There was a blurb I saw on a TV news channel scrawl saying that hip-hop is the least well funded of the all the art genres by the Canada Council, and yet hip-hop is obviously the most relevant music genre to most young people. The evident bias there is an example of my point).

I got a couple of grants in my time, and I appreciated them. They allowed me to execute projects without having to invest my own money, of which I had none. Looking back, I’m not sure if these projects meant much to society as a whole, which is why I no longer take the ‘art is important to society’ argument too seriously. I’ve come to think of art as something more private and personal. And I feel I make more money working than I would by relying on the hand-outs of grants and prizes. I dislike the current-system of cultural funding as it exists, but I wouldn’t support scrapping it altogether.

What I don’t like about this type of ‘taxpayer bitching’ is how the ‘angry conservative’ stereotype falls into ‘I don’t want them spending my money…’. I’ve always found this reason to be nonsense. I don’t understand why we don’t teach people to think of taxes as that salary we citizens pay toward the functioning of the state. Imagine if employers started saying, ‘I don’t want you spending my money on drugs, or drunken weekends, or McDonald’s hamburgers, or home stereo systems, or …’ etc. Employers know where to draw that line in minding their own business. We in turn should trust our governments to spend their funding responsibly, and when, as often happens, it is exposed that they haven’t been doing so, there should be scandal, there should be apologies and firings, and we appreciate the reforms that follow. Corruption should never be the norm, but it should never be unexpected either. ‘Show me a completely smooth operation,’ Frank Herbet wrote in one of his Dune novels, ‘and I’ll show you a cover up. Real boats rock.’ ¹ In other words, human beings are never perfect, and we shouldn’t expect that.

It should not be the case however that the citizen comes to think of culture as an irresponsible expenditure, and yet that has been allowed to happen within my lifetime. We, as a first world nation, can afford to encourage the imagination. God knows we need to in this country.

We pay taxes and we expect a functioning public service and stable infrastructure in return. We aren’t the United States with a military industrial complex, wherein the government subsidizes global violence. We could instead have a cultural-industrial complex and the most we’d have to suffer is visual pollution and bad music, but it would be preferable to a painful and ugly death. Of course, this isn’t on the table because the money is currently in War, and so when we hear talk of Canadian governments trying to attract investment in science, we should ask, science for what? The fact that the Cdn Gov blocked the sale of MDA to land-mine-manufacturing ATK this past week shows that we aren’t immune to such questions and considerations.

When we are told triumphantly that the provincial and/or federal government is running a budget surplus, it is evident that they could be doing much more for the citizens. Unfortunately, a penny-pinching mentality has taken hold, which may be useful as private citizens (I’m currently in a penny-pinching mode myself) but I’m not sure it serves the public interest. If anything, governments should be more forthcoming about their plans for a surplus. Paying off some debt - fine. But holding on to it indefinitely? Not so fine. Are you trying to accumulate interest on the monies so that it grows further? Ok, sure. But when are we going to get a day-care system, and a guaranteed income, and bigger minimum wages, and fatter old-age pension cheques, and investment in affordable housing, better and more frequent public transit, lower tuition rates, cancellation of student-loan debt, and on and on…?

The government still seems to think that its constituents are ignorant people with personal attachments to numbers on pay-stubs who can somehow magically trace those exact numbers into the pockets of the so-called welfare mom all pissy because they’ve been legislated into civilized compassion. Soupcoff echoes this argument when she says ‘Canadians are accustomed to having their money transferred from their own bank accounts to those of the nation’s broadcasters, sculptors and poets.’ Soupcoff then plays a class-card, by writing, ‘Government funding ensures that every time these affluent aesthetes sit down to hear a live piano concerto, they enjoy a nice subsidy from lower-class taxpayers, who are sitting at home reading their Harry Potter books and listening to their Nine Inch Nails CDs. It just doesn’t seem fair.’

I for one have been to a live piano concerto, and that was when I could afford it under the TSO’s program of selling $12 tickets to those under 30. Since I’m now over 30, I haven’t been to the TSO in four years. I did however buy the latest Nine Inch Nails CD this past week, to listen to when I want a change from the classical music I used to stream from CBC 2 and which I now get from alternative outlets like Classical 96.3 or icebergradio.com. My personal example here to say that there’s room in life for both Harry Potter and Tolstoy, and that Nine Inch Nails is actually pretty good.

Class-based access to culture is the result of both education and pricing. But it’s also a question of interest. So what if some people just aren’t interested? I’m not interested in Harry Potter (I haven’t read any of the books or seen any of the movies) and in this binary I’m lucky: this makes me look like I made ‘the right choice’ to people like Harold Bloom, who would be happy to see me reading Macbeth if I was interested in magic. But if millions are loving Harry Potter, clearly I’m missing out on something. It’s just a question of taste. (And while Bloom has a point in questioning it’s literary value, life needs the occasional piece of candy).

Greater funding should translate in greater accessibility. The reward of the arts should be available to all. This argument justifies libraries: publicly funded knowledge made accessible. Would Soupcoff suggest we  shut down all libraries because people can buy whatever books they want at Indigo/Chapters? My understanding is that type of argument would have been made in the 19th Century, when publicly funded childhood schooling was considered controversial. But we’ve come to take democratized education and accessible knowledge for granted. We are in the process of achieving a future society where the arts will also be taken for granted and be thus ensured against this type of financial short-sightedness. But we are not there yet.

Perhaps it needs to be said that the argument for ceasing funding was allowed to take hold because the arts were allowed to become incomprehensible. (It did not have to be that way, but that is past. The mistake is allowing it to continue).

To that end, Marni Soupcoff and I agree that, “The decision about what to watch — American Idol or A Beachcombers Christmas — should be one people make for themselves,’ but we do not agree that, ‘[it is]not one the government makes for them (or at least tries to: Despite its best efforts, the government still hasn’t succeeded in getting more than a handful of us to watch CBC television, even if we do pay for it).’ The Government doesn’t make us to anything. As for the CBC, our ‘failure to watch’ is indicative of the corporation’s mismanagement and cultural stupidity. They thought we wanted to watch ‘The One‘.

The traditionally called Higher Arts are more often than not rendered distasteful by being poorly taught, and those like myself who pursue them do so either because they weren’t taught at all (as in my case; no opportunity was taken to ruin them for me) or because the person has a inexplicable passion for them (which also used to be true in my case). Soupcoff: ‘But let’s be honest — who makes up the majority of the audiences of symphonies, art galleries and ballets? It’s middle-class and rich people who can afford to pay for their own entertainment.’

I hate ballet and I don’t understand why Karen Cain is a house-hold name and Jeff Wall is not. Nor, for that matter, why Rex Harrington’s retirement made it onto the CTV news in 2003. But it doesn’t bother me that it’s funded. I went to art school because I wanted to study the arts. For that I was seen by my conventional friends as being weird. I think it’s weird that Toronto has a ballet school, but that’s just to say I sympathize with its potential students, and I’m glad I live in a society where young girls who want to destroy their feet and starve themselves for the pleasure of jumping into the arms of a gay man have a place where they can go and feel welcome. In other words, it’s nice that people have options when it comes to doing something with their lives. And whatever encourages the broadening of those options is a good thing, even if it does to some seem weird.

To that end, we have the arts: it is the realm of imagination where alternative ways to think and live one’s life are fostered. For example, we have been progressively moving toward a more peaceful and ‘civilized’ (in the mannered since of the term) soceity², inspired by the examples offered to us in movies and novels. Consider how Star Trek’s universally acknowledged attraction is it’s vision of a future of inclusion and peace-on-Earth. But Star Trek is an American show and offers an American vision of an American future. If the CBC were living up to its mandate, it would support a Canadian future-based program, to give us some sense of what our future might be like. History is necessary, the present is obvious, but what kind of world are we moving toward? A valid question. We have too many future scenarios that offer dystopias, and we need more utopian ones to inspire us. This is not a job that funding ‘math and science’ will do for us. If the math-n-science is to take us to the Moon and Mars, ask where the idea of going off-world came in the first place.

On the April 7th 2008 episode of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Paikin asked former Ontario Finance minister Greg Sorbara how high the arts rated in the government’s priorities:

Steve Paikin: Honestly, honestly, how high up the ladder are cultural institutions in the Minster of Finance’s play-book?’
Greg Sorbara: During my time they were really high up.
SP: They’re not education, and they’re not health care.
GB: You know what, they are what creates a healthy city and they are the way in which we educate ourselves. But the fact is, the future of this city and of this region is in arts and creativity and the production of those arts and the dissemination of that creativity. (Mp3 at 14:50)

Sobera’s answer was wonderful, but I think it could have also been answered this way: ‘what’s the point of having health care and education if you’re going to spend your life bored?’

Daniel Richler once described Mike Harris and Ralph Klein as examples of educational failure, and since hearing him say that ³ I’ve always kept that in mind. The people who Marni Soupcoff is pandering to are educational failures. I don’t care what kind of credentials an MBA or the like amounts to if your indifference to the arts has become openly hostile, and if you’re prone to use words like ‘loser’ when thinking of them. If that’s the case, your education has been no such thing. If you managed to go to university, you paid for your job training and partially subsidized your voluntary lobotomization. An educated person can be indifferent to the arts, but they should at least recognize their value.

As I’ve written, I’m not that much of a fan of the arts-councils. But I support public funding of culture. I just think the process could use reformation. If the Canadian Council was able to fund Soupcoff to go on a self-education sabbatical during which she expose herself to what the best of human beings have been able to achieve, perhaps she might be grateful. However, you can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Or, as I’ve heard recently, ‘you can cure ignorance but you can’t cure stupid’.

I’d like to see politicians and journalists start pandering to this societies’ educated rather than to its stupid.

__________________
1. Chapterhouse Dune, 1985, p. 119
2. My position is that the democratic deficit is to blame for increasing violence: governance is disconnected from the citizens who want more social services and less military spending.
3. On the defunct CBC Friday night program out of Vancouver; name of which I don’t remember, circa 2002

I’d rather visit here:

(From, Via)
then here:

(From)

For one, I imagine the first would have a fantastic library.
Although the second is my desktop at work,
The first is my desktop at home.

Fuck Shanghai.

Used for my NSCAD Photoshop class.
Macintosh pre-formated.
Also on Flickr

I’ve come to realize that the CBC is obsolete, and all the fuss and bother about classical music ‘disappearing’ from CBC 2 is pointless. I listen to classical on the net all the time. I prefer it actually, since I can do without the CBC hosts. (That promo guy they have on now drives me nuts; not to mention all the other falsely enthusiastic banter).

For the past two days this is what I listened to at work:

http://www.icebergradio.com/ - classical section, baroque and renaissance.

I’ve been sympathetic to Russell Smith’s defense of CBC 2 in his Globe column over the past couple of years, even bringing up his arguments to a CBC employee I once knew.

Marc Weisblott, in reviewing this for his latest ‘Scrolling Eye’ post on the Eye website, writes

What [Russell Smith] said during a debate on CBC Radio One’s The Current on Wednesday was a bit more nuanced, though, advocating radio for “the sensitive kid bored by the beer-drinking frat culture” like he was. “There are hundreds of thousands of emo kids, and underprivileged kids, around the country who need an escape from the boredom of the bored mass culture around them.”

But, when those proverbial emo kids have never touched a terrestrial radio in their lives, the only place to turn is to the vitriolic greybeards.

…Exactly. I was one of those sensitive kids bored then & now by frat culture, and that’s why I listened to CBC 2. But I’m dismayed to find the same voices on it that were there when I was a child (Jurgen Gothe, I’m thinking of you, and wish you well in your upcoming retirement).

The internet is now there for curious and sensitive youth. With regard to classical, I tend to use Wikipedia to find a location to download it from when I want something for the iPod. The only way Smith’s argument stands up for me is to consider sensitive bored kids using dial-up on the Prairie. In that case, one should bring the protests to the likes of Bell, who’ve begun throttling bandwidth.

To remain relevant to the 21st Century, the CBC should become an ISP, and primarily focus on net streams. Radio should be so old hat to them they could afford to treat it as an afterthought. The situation at the present moment is the reverse. While they did revamp their website last fall, they are still focused on using Windows Media Player, still being stingy with MP3 downloads and podcasting, and still have a stream which is prone to buffering errors.

I get the message, and the message I have in return is

Fuck you too CBC 2.

(On Akimbo)
Well, there’s always next year’s surplus.

And consider this:

“Why weren’t these surplus monies given to the arts councils?”

perhaps to

“end the backroom deals” conducted by “the community review and peer assessment”

If you think the government is corrupted by back-room deals, what would it need to do to prove otherwise? Could such a test be passed by ‘community review and a peer assessment’ organizations? The whole point of ‘peer review’ is to build bias into the system in order to favour applicants (this is why it’s an important part of the judiciary – so that in ancient (and contemporary) times, the burden of proof for a criminal charge had to overcome the bias of a jury of peers. And why O.J. Simpson got away with murder: because a jury of his peers decided that burden of proof had not been met, a decision that had to stand because of the nature of the process).

Perhaps the gov thinks

‘enough is enough’ , ie. they perhaps think there are giving enough already.

But then again, there’s always next year. Perhaps Clive Robertson and Vera Frankel should begin a whitepaper to outline why the monies are needed, and what could be done with them. The older I get the more I become sensitive to arguments about responsibility. I ask the following rhetorically: Why should artists assume they are owed a living by society?

I recently heard something like this said by a right-wing pundit: ‘that people shouldn’t assume they are owed a living by society’. I don’t agree, but am not sure at this point what an appropriate counter-argument could be. The right-wingers would have everyone be responsible and manage their money carefully and aim to be self-sufficient. The Amish are probably an ideal here: they’re so excellent at managing money that they refuse all government assistance. They don’t need it. They’re also so self-sufficient they can afford to turn their backs on contemporary society.

I for one don’t appreciate the idea that because some people are fuck-ups and waste money on drugs or MFA degrees that means they should be condemned to poverty and social exclusion. I hate the idea of punishment in all its forms, and this attitude of letting fuck-ups suffer as homeless or whatever I don’t want to support.

That being said, it is a red flag for artists to demand more money. “Why are they not self-sufficient?” This is certainly a valid question concerning how many artists have turned they’re backs to soceity. If you want to be like the Amish, then figure out how to get by without government funds.

We’ve had year after year of being told artists are important for society, but where is the evidence for that? I see grants being used for projects that are more attuned to ‘personal development’ than that of society. This then raises the question of fairness and responsibility: why should artists get grant money to pay the rent while x & y have to work shitty/boring/whatever jobs?

Whenever I talk with artists about applying for grants, they’re always stressed about how to do their write-ups for whatever project which is just a front for them to get three months of rent and grocery money.

Let’s just be honest and ask that the Provincial Government to create a ‘creative subsidy’ so that individuals who are creative can afford regular ’sabbaticals’. We might as well lobby Richard Florida (since everyone in a Moores suit cares what he thinks) to include a chapter in his next book (to be on indie music) on the need to have time off – weeks, months, or years, during which one is free to stay up all night, or lay around stoned for 48 hours, or spend afternoons at the library. In some of the later texts of Richard Rorty, he wrote about academics’ need to write up their own grants in order to get time off to unwind, recharge, and read. The sabbatical is cherished part of a creative life, and if you want to lobby for more funding, this is what you want to lobby for – a subsidy for the creative to take time off.

So, getting back to this poster: the Ontario Government helped out institutions who are now better positioned to support the creatives within the community. Boo-hoo. They want the backroom deals to favour them directly, not the only market for their type of art. Whan whan.

(From)

[From Goodreads 08w14:4]

Honestly, if a business can’t afford to pay all its employees a livable wage, than that business should be considered a fail. What are businesses for? (The wrong answer is to say the enrichment of the owners at the expense of the employees, because that’s like Marxism or something, and we’re supposed to be past all that).

I remember when I was working for a minimum wage in Halifax, feeling both totally exploited and humiliated into enforced poverty. Further, the business had like 6 people on the payroll when it only really needed three. That’s where I got the idea that mismanagement should never be an excuse to pay people peanuts. And why I have no sympathy for the business owners who claim raising the minimum wage would be too hard on them. They’re not paying themselves a minimum wage are they?

My greater concern for raising the minimum wage is this society’s capacity to maintain an unfair status quo. As is pointed out in this article, adjusted for inflation, today’s Ontario minimum wage is equivalent to what it was thirteen years ago. I’ve noticed in the past that whenever the minimum wage goes up, so do the prices at Tim Hortons, (which I consider to be an unofficial index of inflation). So the gains of the working poor are immediately offset to erase them. The article begins by pointing out that the Ontario minimum wage went up last week. This week Tim Hortons had signs at its counters saying the prices of some menu items would rise next week. Two weeks ago, the Go Train commuter system rose its ticket prices too.

So, in 2010, when the minimum wage rises to $10 and hour, count on 1.60 coffees (rather than the current 1.42 lg) at your national coffee chain, and corresponding ticket prices across our belle province and sun-shiny country. - Timothy

A dream of a clone of Axel Rose releasing Chinese Democracy, and starting to tour it, when the REAL Axel Rose attacks him on stage, gripping him in a headlock and harrangues the clone and the audience, saying ‘the record isn’t fucking ready yet’.

•Rainy Spring days call forth Nirvana from the playlists; angry Kurt Cobains yell through headphones to say, this was the season when my sadness and alienation and stomach condition became all too much. I’ll never have an email address and I won’t know what the fuck a google is. My songs will live forever on compact discs and cassette tapes, I don’t understand what you mean by iTunes and iPods.

By age 28 I looked out onto a world through eyes that had seen more life than the hurt voice on the playlists. By 33 I’d had beer with a fellow who followed Cobain’s example by rounding off his 29 years with a sleep, bookending my own experience with the extra two years on either end. What is life beyond a mindstream experiencing sense impressions? The gossamer thoughts between the ears, the holograms of remembered scenes beyind the eyes, and the occasional flood of music to soup it up. And for some, the movie ends quicker, the awareness peeling itself away from the inside of the skull and walking into a sunny parking lot to find the car.

Kurt Cobain passes out in with noise and a hurt head. This is beyond the temporary amnesia of a concussion, for he comes to having forgoten everything, including where he left his body. He now finds himself a baby, then a child, and now is suffering through school, aged about thirteen. Perhaps now he is a girl? This teenager’s bedroom is covered in posters of rockstars, and perhaps there is a Niravana poster there as well? This Kurt-tulku thinks Kurt Cobain rocked, complelty oblivious to the fact that he’s the same mind. But this is to speculate on something unpredicatable.

Perhaps he’s a pigeon, a dog, your gerbil, or a cat. Perhaps he became a salmon and was eaten in a resaturant.

But in my imagination, this Kurt kid is starting a high school band, discovering he has a fucking great talent for music.