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Who Needs Art, Anyway?

Politicians don't value it. Why would they? It threatens them.

Dorothy Woodend 4 Sep 2009TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee every other Friday.

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Scene from Adam Curtis's documentary 'The Trap'

A few years back, I had one of those annoying conversations with someone that began, "If the arts are so great, they should be able to pay for themselves." I sputtered on about countries around the world, even other Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec) that pour money into culture. But nothing seemed sufficient to stand up to the almighty dollar sign. My conversational partner sniffed something about taxpayers footing bill for whingy artists. I muttered "philistine" under my breath, and we went our separate ways.

Now of course, the question has reoccurred all over again, brought up by Harper in the last federal election, and now by the cuts the B.C. government has made to the arts. It continues to rankle just as hard. Even posing the question makes me feel tired all over, but here I go. 

So, how important is art? I don't mean the question facetiously, or worse, fatuously. When you work in the arts, all day, every day, it occasionally comes as something of a shock to realize that there are large sections of the population that do not care one whit about the so-called 'arts'. Inside the great hullabaloo over the cuts in funding to schools, libraries, the environment, and yes, the arts, is an ongoing tired old argument about what is truly important enough to spend money on. Your kid's education may certainly take precedence, the environment, yes... yes. But some modern dancer somewhere spinning in circles, or an artist immersing a crucifix in dubious fluids saved up in a mason jar?

It's too easy to poke at the arts with a stick -- that could even be interpreted as some kind of performance piece -- but what is central in this debate is the notion the arts are somehow peripheral to society, off in a corner somewhere, playing with bits of clay or torn up paper.

I would argue otherwise.

Dehumanized

If you go to a restaurant, for example, if there were no artists, there would effectively be no restaurant. No architect to design the building, no potter to make the plates, no designer to sew the clothes on the sexy waitresses, no sign maker to draw the menu, etc. You take my point, it is an obvious one, after all. So, yes, why should we support the arts? Simply because without them, we'd be sitting in a mud puddle, banging rocks together for fun and entertainment. Sure... but, there is another even more fundamental idea beneath this equation of money and value.

In the most recent issue of Harper's magazine, Mark Slouka's essay "Dehumanized" does a very fine job of summing up the debate over humanities and the arts versus math and science. He makes the argument that by winnowing all of human behaviour and culture into demonstrable, controllable numerical values, the U.S. (which includes the rest of Western society) is effectively turning into a nation of "employees, not citizens."

Writes Slouka: "What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what a culture considers important... In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of the species, including  -- in the last, last analysis our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I'm not aware of it."

Slouka is writing about the American education system, but it's an interesting place to begin since this is most often where things do begin -- in grade two with a section on poetry or Van Gogh or the music of Beethoven. Yes, they still teach such things. Dangerous, subversive stuff, it is too. What does any fascist society start with destroying, but the arts. Just think about the Nazis, or Stalin, rounding up those troubling, troublesome artists, burning them and their works into ash. Of course, now the means and methodology of getting rid of artists isn't nearly so messy or time consuming. Merely take away their funding, and they'll have to get service jobs like everyone else.  Every time I think about this stuff, all I hear is Blake's poem "London" running through my head. Mind-forged manacles indeed... not much has changed, although we've swapped state-sanctioned hypocrisy for big business controlling how we are all supposed to think.

What about jobs?

But will teaching your kid how to write a poem earn them a job in the future? Probably not. More importantly, will teaching them to think critically and understand in the broadest possible sense pose a problem for corporations in the future? Quite possibly. After all, corporate thinking seems to be, it's not a very big step from puddling about with poetry in elementary school to raging anarchism in the streets. Slouka's point, although he stops short of conspiracy theorist territory, is that there is something of a master plan at work. He describes it thusly, "Rein in the humanities effectively enough  -- whether through active repression, fiscal starvation or linguistic marginalization -- and you create a space, an opportunity. Dogma adores a vacuum."

Reading this, I think about films, naturally enough, and primarily documentaries. If you watch very many docs about the state of the world, you cannot help but feel that there is actually some master plan at work. Filmmaker Adam Curtis in his film The Trap typified it as turning human beings into mindless, easily directed drones, churches replaced by shopping malls, everything whittled away into ones and zeros. (Even documentaries are no longer as clean as they once were, witness Art & Copy, which is funded in part by the very thing it celebrates, advertising.) But, you don't have to go too far or watch too much to start to feel like there is a war going on that far exceeds the borders of little old British Columbia.  Slouka lays it out in terms of humanities versus big business, but it surpasses even those labels. Charlie Booker (who, coincidentally, I think I've fallen in love with) writing about Adam Curtis's new film in The Guardian sums up the ability of art to surpass even the limitations of itself. 

Writes the luscious Mr. Booker about Mr. Curtis' new film, "One particular segment, set to 'River Deep, Mountain High', feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe." Which makes me want to see it immediately... But more importantly, says Curtis about his own work, "The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism... The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied... It's a political idea. That's the central dynamic of our life." Just reading about this makes me excited. God bless old Blighty! Where difficult, odd, strange, intractable stuff continues to get made. 

What they fear

Of course, over here, in pallid underfunded British Columbia, the only place you may get to see Curtis's work is at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Unless of course, their funding gets pulled too. Then you're out of luck, sucker. 

What Curtis, Booker, and Slouka have in common is the idea that if art can take apart ideas and muddled dogma, it can also dismantle the infrastructure of power and control. If so, why would the grey-suited corporate types have any interest in funding the means of their undoing? The obvious answer is that they don't. Thus libraries, education and the arts take it in the teeth, because if we cannot think or write or understand clearly, we cannot know what is being done to us. Nor can we fight back.  [Tyee]

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