(Well that certainly got your attention. Under absolutely no condition should anything I am about to write and you later will read be taken seriously. I'm going to do these Just A Suggestion columns from time to time for a very good reason. Not to go all Friedrich Engels here and grind all of us into a bored pulp, but there is something to be said for Dialectic Argument. It is only by forcibly pressing a totally opposite view to an existent norm that anything good ever happens. The outcome should always be better than what was there before the argument began. There are several revolutionary states whose citizenry might beg to differ, but that not inconsiderable caveat aside, a Dialectic is still an interesting beacon to shine on a topic.
And it seemed to work out okay for Jonathan Swift. Onwards.)
It quite troubled me when I wrote my last television column that there was not a single Canadian-made show in the Top 20 this past season except for Hockey Night in Canada. And I still believe that sporting events are not a test of the strength of a broadcaster. People will watch a game because of the game, not because of who is carrying a game or how good they are at it. Outside of the ratings bump Coach's Corner gives HNIC each week, the CBC could put braying sheep in the booth and still draw the same ratings. Plus sheep will work for grass and the occasional post-game ram.
But there it is: no comedy, no drama, no W5 or Fifth Estate. No cops chasing robbers or Newfies chasing seals. The country has changed the channel on itself and turned to the U.S. like never before. For the other 19 shows were collectively as All-American as the offensive line at Ohio State. So I was mulling this over and thought perhaps I should check the Top Ten bestseller lists for Fiction and Non-Fiction. Here are the results: Looking at the most recent numbers, Canadian fiction has two of the top ten slots, while holding four of the ten non-fiction slots. We certainly aren't going to be accused of jingoism any time soon, but those are reasonable numbers.
As for movies ... well you don't really need me to look, now do you? Oh ... why not, let's do it. Miracles do happen. The '69 Mets won the World Series. But in the Canadian Top 20 for the most recent weekend, I see a movie from France, Australia, India and 17 from the U.S. but nary a one from Canada. And we are, after all, the country that in years gone by produced Rashomon, Persona, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and Meatballs. (Look, if we say it enough people will start to believe it, and the bit about Meatballs is true anyway.)
So as I look at this, I see that decades of national, provincial and private support to the television and movie industries have produced as much success as a dead man. Now I grant you that popularity isn't everything, but you have to concede that it certainly is something. It's not as though a television or film producer sets out to make a show that no one wants to watch. I think that went out of style with Be-In's and Andy Warhol's 'Sleep'. (That was a one camera movie of a man sleeping. It ran as long as the nap.) Unless you're the new Emily Dickinson and keep your poetry to yourself, sewn into little silk pillows, if you're an artist you want lots and lots of people to demonstrate by their attendance that you're quite good at what you do.
Any artist who would argue the point may only do so if they have never charged anyone to watch, feel, taste, smell or hear their craft. As soon as that moment happens, you always want more of the same. Back to the point.
What's delightful to me as a book reviewer is that the healthiest cultural industry by this standard is the one everyone keeps literally writing off - book publishing. Old as Gutenberg himself, book publishing has endured after challenges from symphonies, chautaqua, movies, records and radio; movies, TV, internet; VHS, CD, DVD and coming to you in HD. And Wii. Whee! The book industry knows how to balance its books in both senses of the word. New talent is put over on the strength of old talent's sales, until the new talent is ready to become the old talent. Margaret Atwood's virgin birth was Yann Martel.
The book industry too is also recognizable to the international nature of literary greatness. I exclusively deal with the Canadian publishers, yet just this year I've reviewed books from British, Irish, Indian and South African writers in roughly equal collective proportion to the Canadian writers. It is not a heavily subsidfized industry, its books stand on the same shelves as Stephen King and besides the real concerns about copyright in the internet age it just seems to go about its business without the mass suicides running through the magazine industry.
So what happens if we look at the book industry as a model? Where does this lead us?
It leads us to folding the whole damn thing up. The Canadian Cultural Committee Collective -CanCult for short - composed of all the cheque-writing government agencies and advisory boards from the Canada Council on down. Clearly they aren't good at what they do. If they were baseball managers, they'd have been fired and dumped on the curb of sports celebrity dinners years ago. And if the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same action while expecting a different result, show me how this is not insane?
At one point, I spent two very fond years as the President of a lovely organization called the Thunder Bay Regional Arts Council. It held events that allowed artists to exchange ideas in good, clean settings; it helped to promote them; it assisted them with their own grant applications. TBRAC,a s it was referred to, didn't have a huge government grant, but it was an important one - the Province of Ontario and the City of Thunder Bay between them paid for the one staff person and the one one tidy office just large enough to hold Board meetings. That's it.
TBRAC was choked to death by the Province of Ontario and the City of Thunder Bay because those two grave entities had two agendas. One, they wanted TBRAC to do more programming - which would require more staff - which would require more fund-raising - which would require more staff - which would mean that TBRAC would have devolved from an organization that served artists' needs to one that concentrated on fund-raising in order to sustain itself. Well, isn't that just fine?
The second agenda was worse. TBRAC was independent and had a large member base. The Ontario Arts Council didn't care about that because the Ontario Arts Council was in Toronto and it existed in order to flit about like moths into towns and cities, tell people JUST WHAT TO DO! then fly away like Tinkerbell back to the land of lost boys.And the City of Thunder Bay did care about that because it had its own organization, its Arts and Heritage Committee which had no such members to answer to, so they grabbed TBRAC by its financial neck and strangled it.
Therefore ...
I am not pre-disposed to support of CanCult. I admit my prejudice. I do not seek a cure.
In its place, and the tax savings would be substantial, I propose the Irish Solution. The Republic of Ireland invented the World's Best Arts Policy years ago. Artists don't pay tax. Done! The Republic recognized the feast and famine nature of artists' incomes so therefore recognized that taking a given perfcentage of income tax might be grossly out-of-whack to the two years' previous or the two years' following. One could start bringing in averaging laws and the like, but that woukld just be an excuse to buy an accountant a fresh box of Cubans and hiring a thousand storm-trooping auditors, so the Irish said as we Irish do, 'Feck idall. Laugh talone.' And artists got a pass on the income they earned from the arts. For one, the movie director moved over like a shot and promptly bought a horse farm. The money spent on nags, bags of feed, stewards and whomever mowed the lawn and kept the house I'm sure more than made up for what 50 mournful balladeers might have earned on the pub circuit over the same period.
And that's the bottom line. I welcome - and will sew into little pillows - your comments below.
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