10/7/08

The (Not) Exclusive Club of Poor Artists

Kelly McParland comments on the self-centered whining of the 'arts' community..which according to Conference Canada includes nearly everyone!

...It was more than a little gratifying to learn from the National Post Editorial Board that I qualify as a Canadian artist and thus able to share insights and grant application forms with Margaret Atwood, Colm Feore and other leading lights of the stage, screen and written word.

It was less satisfying to discover that half the Canadian population also apparently rates full membership in the “arts industry” that Ms. Atwood says is worth $86 billion to Canada yet has been “totally dismissed” by the Bush/Harper military regime in those moments when it isn’t supplying $50 billion in tax breaks to Big Oil and plotting to send more troops to Iraq. (You’ll have to forgive me: ever since I became a part of the arts industry I’ve felt compelled to make trite allegations against the Prime Minister using borrowed cliches from my American colleagues -- God I hate Americans! -- while slamming any business that makes a profit and is thus able to support the networks, publishers and cultural institutions I live on).

According to my fellow culture vultures here in our cold-water sixth-floor walk-up garret in Don Mills, the $86 billion figure cited by Ms Atwood derives from a Conference Board of Canada calculation that takes figures from 2003, gooses them up with a few years of economic assumptions, chucks in a whole whack of ancillary activity and projections and finally extrapolates all that to reach $84.6 billion, which is rounded out to $86 billion, the extra billion or so being for canapes.

The estimate includes a rather broad definition of culture, embracing a number of dubious characters you’d never see invited to the Junos, unless they were considering financing your next project, in which case they would qualify as patrons of the arts and thus become barely tolerable. Advertising executives, it appears, are artists. Public relations hacks ... sorry public relations performers ... are artists. The teenager who takes your ticket at the Cineplex (when she can tear herself away from her iPod and her cellphone) is an artist. Every slovenly Tory-voting tax-cut-favouring Harper-loving photographer, editor and bean-counting administrator at this sorry excuse for a newspaper -- including the malicious little copy editors who would love to ruin my day by questioning my allegations and second-guessing my “facts” ( if I gave them half a chance) -- is an artist.

We are all artists. Canada, it turns out, is one of the most artistic nations on the planet. We have culture in our blood, artistic fervor ...



Another artist at the National Post created this interesting poll tracker, which shows that in spite of the 'art' communities efforts to rally the public behind their 'cause', Canadians are still backing Harper.

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