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Revolution
Conservatives "fly" "planes" "through" "arts" "buildings": “beautiful”
By Kevin Potvin
All they’ve done is remind everyone that art is revolutionary in its very existence
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Everybody knows the marketing gold that can be transmuted out of even leaden creations by the act of official censure. Nothing could have promoted the undeservedly wildly-famous career of the recently late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn better than his having aroused the ire, and censure, of the Soviet politburo. If fascistic authorities never drew everyone’s attention to it, no one would notice that literature, and art more generally, has anything to offer beyond pretty entertainment and pleasant distraction.
In a time when there seemed nothing Canada’s artists could do to escape the tyranny of the beautiful, along came the bull-in-a-china-shop Conservatives straight out of Alberta and hell-bent on some cattle-wrastlin’ in Ottawa. The first thing that’s going to happen, once the recently-announced Conservative slash-and-burn of a dozen federally-funded arts programs takes bite, is everyone is going to twig on to the idea that maybe something is going on with art in the country worth looking into. The moralizing busy-body Tories wouldn’t be so grit-toothed about crashing so many subsidy and aid programs for art if there wasn’t something being subsidized and aided that really bothered them. And even the most dyed-in-the-wool Conservative supporter knows that if the Conservatives are morally outraged by something, it must be something good.
The affected arts groups and organizations are muted by their fear of incurring more wrath and more cuts, otherwise they’d be screaming bloody murder, because it marks the end of a lot of what they’ve known and trusted in for a long time. Ironically however, what’s bad for arts organizations may be good for art. But this is not the old-school claim that artists need to be starving to make genuine, authentic art.
It was never about the quantity of money artists had, but always the quality. Where it’s from is way more important that how much there is, and in the case of Canada, far too much of the cash flow moving through artists is coming through the state’s treasury. Say what they will about the arm’s length mechanisms by which funding and granting agencies are immunized from state political controls, but for my money, state-supported arts is and always will be state propaganda. And while the purposes of state propaganda are not always antithetical to art—see Soviet realism or Chinese and Cuban revolutionary poster art—lack of awareness or flat denial among state-supported artists that what they’re doing is propagandistic seems to nullify any possibility of validity in their art. If you’re not even aware of the purpose you’re locked into serving, how can you possibly claim to have your own purpose, let alone to have successfully served it?
There is money for art in this country, maybe not enough for all the people who want to be paid to be artists, but enough of it to generate a privileged elite of artists. They’ll be fine regardless of the presence or absence of government subsidy and aid from any level. The rest is art-as-therapy, a good thing for the mental health of Canadian society, but it’s not helping us see things a whole different way. Art by its nature undermines the status quo: it is in its very conception necessarily revolutionary, just by its being fueled by someone’s urge to say something that hasn’t been said before. If it’s not doing that, it is by definition repeating what’s been said before, and hence reinforcing the established status quo. The reason state sponsorship of art always seems to favour the production of this particular kind of art is because by its nature, the state is bound to act counter-revolutionary, to uphold and reinforce the status quo.
All the Conservatives have done is remind everyone that state sponsored art is all counter-revolutionary propaganda. That would even be fine if things under state guidance were rolling along tickityboo. But for many reasons, we’ve become aware of the need for a whole lot of change in how we do things, as evidenced most starkly by the break-up of the polar ice caps and the new normal in natural resource prices. The Conservatives have inadvertently cleared the decks, leaving a whole lot more room for real art to do its thing and start tipping the whole work over, and the only place any effective tipping of the state can come from is outside the embrace of the state.
In another time and place, Conservatives’ actions of recent weeks crashing all the state subsidy and aid programs for the arts would be grievously regrettable. But in this particular time and place, there’s a little voice in the back of my head wanting to pump my fist in the air and go “yeah!” at all the beautiful destruction. They’re hitting exactly the right spot as far as I’m concerned, even if it’s for all sorts of wrong, twisted and stupid—that is, Conservative—reasons.
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