Viewpoint
Heather Mallick
When art gets up a Tory snoot
Last Updated: Friday, September 12, 2008 | 6:20 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
The pettiness of the Conservative government in cutting off money for artists who want to go on an airplane trip is shameful. It is Canadian small-mindedness worthy of the 1950s. You know, the era before Canada began to grow interesting, to others and to itself.
The government has quietly cut one program after another this week. No more money for the Canadian Arts and Heritage Sustainability Program, which helped more than 500 small arts organizations across Canada. No more money for the Trade Routes scheme, which helped fund the wonderful and world-famous Toronto documentary film festival called Hot Docs.
Members of the Toronto-based experimental rock band Holy Fuck. (Courtesy James Mejia/Holy Fuck Music) It isn't hard to figure out why a government wouldn't like documentaries. They're about facts, and facts have a liberal bias, as the satirist Stephen Colbert constantly points out.
But it is hard to understand why Ottawa is making the cuts in such a shyly vicious way, not even announcing them but merely posting them on obscure web pages, breaking hearts quietly.
The Conservatives appear to despise the arts. Surely if they feel these cuts would greatly please what the party thinks is its "base," why don't they shout about the cuts from the heights of Parliament Hill?
Do little harm
The Conservatives assume their base is Westerners who are suspicious of wasteful literature, painting etc. Even if this were so, and I doubt it is, this alleged base is surely interested in keeping Canadian culture alive and well and visible on the world stage.
After all, Calgary is angling to be the home of the new National Portrait Gallery and I hope it goes there rather than to Toronto; we have too much here, too little there.
So what's with the torture of tiny arts groups who do a great deal of good and not much harm?
We're talking about a mere $4.7 million spent on something called PromArt that gives travel grants to artists. By federal government standards, it's a derisory sum. For a Canadian household, it is the equivalent of a box of three-ply President's Choice facial tissues. It won't break the bank.
But it is breaking the heart of Les Grand Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, which just put on a stunning dance show in Paris, so stunning that the French complained of its "eclecticism."
When the French say something is just too weird, you know you have succeeded, and I say that as a person who went to that museum near the Louvre where they show off space-age 1960s furniture made of plywood, feathers, vinyl and mink tongues. (How the French keep a straight face I will never know.)
Why not party?
Here's a quote from the National Post about the ballet's reception in Paris three weeks ago: "A pre-show gathering for champagne-sipping VIPs was attended by Canadian ambassador Marc Lortie, Quebec Culture Minister Christine St-Pierre and a host of local artistic luminaries who munched on foie gras and caviar before joining an audience of more than 2,500 for a rousing performance of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin's Minus One."
I know Stephen Harper would have preferred scrambled eggs in steam tables, but the ambassador and the Quebec minister did their jobs and made sure Canada looked good before the kind of people who judge these things.
I'm glad they did, even though I detest the ballet, a Johnny-come-lately art form with pretensions of grandeur. But many adore the ballet and didn't know Canadian ballet could be so alarming, and I'm pleased that we alarmed them.
There are many kinds of art to love or despise. I love musicians Feist and Daniel Lanois, writers Douglas Coupland, Joan Barfoot and Vincent Lam, and photographers Jeff Wall and Edward Burtynsky.
These artists were poor once; we taxpayers helped them succeed.
Simon Houpt, the Globe and Mail's New York correspondent, wrote an elegiac piece this week on the disappearance of the annual Canada Day Party in Central Park.
Canada once offered New Yorkers our geniuses: Joni Mitchell tributes, the heartbreakingly wonderful Tragically Hip, the perfect Rufus Wainwright, that sort of thing. We send our Canadian young into the world for praise and they receive it.
Last call
There was no party this year, and there won't be again if the Conservatives stay in power.
A Foreign Affairs spokesperson hailed fiscal responsibility. "The government is committed to a more disciplined approach to managing spending." This is how bureaucrats maul the language. There's somebody who could have used a grant to study English lit.
But it became apparent that the Conservatives were seeking revenge for the money having occasionally gone to individuals they dislike. One was Avi Lewis, who received a grant to show his great documentary The Take at an Australian film festival, thus earning distribution, the profits of which went right back to the National Film Board.
Author and journalist Gwynne Dyer also received some money once. According to the Globe and Mail, he is considered a "left-wing writer" to Conservative culture haters. My understanding is that he analyzes war with some intensity. I wasn't aware he had a wing on either side.
And then there's a band called Holy Fuck, which has a record deal in Britain and is touring Germany.
"Holy fuck" is what Canadians say when raccoons get into the garbage, or when your baby vomits in the stroller. It's no big deal. But no, "I don't even want to say it [their name] on the phone," said the prissy Foreign Affairs spokeswoman.
No more spikey oddities
So the University of Calgary's Nickle Arts Museum will no longer get a grant to send an exhibit to Poland, as Houpt reported. Canadian dance troupes won't go to China and Mexico. All so the Conservatives can harm individuals they personally resent, like Dyer and Lewis.
In a small country, artists need help. They help us in turn by creating an image of Canada in the minds of others. Did you ever think of Iceland before you heard Björk? Did you not think better of a country that raised this spiky little oddity?
Matt McQuaid, bass player for Holy Fuck, says he's puzzled by the complaints that the artists weren't "mainstream" enough. His group was nominated for a Juno Award, he points out, and shortlisted for the $20,000 Polaris prize. They're on MuchMusic.
Holy Fuck is art that appeals to the young, and there's something about the young — rebellious, energetic, sexually attractive, loud — that gets up a Tory's nose.
McQuaid is right. Success is mainstream. But it's also true that you can define art as tending away from the mainstream. The mainstream contains wonderful things, like Judd Apatow movies, but they don't by definition stand out. They're part of the seamless fabric that fills our days.
Good art is odd or startling or original; it shifts your perspective. Edward Burtynsky's industrial landscapes are so appalling that I now look at man-made objects with a kind of horror. Can anything produced by this brutality be both useful and good?
Now that's Marx's voice bellowing in my ear. So Burtynsky must be a revolutionary.
He isn't. He is simply an artist with a wondering, wandering eye, a unique eye, and he has enhanced Canada's reputation internationally as much as Harper has run it down with his lapping at George W. Bush's ankles.
The cuts are shameful and cheap. Worse than that, they are spiteful, a character trait that makes me writhe with disgust when I find it in myself. What a government.
