This topic keeps coming up in so many ways, and it’s always because some wrong-headed sort is eager to throw other people’s money at artists of some stripe.

Not to date this blog too badly - because the topic seems timeless after all - but the most recent incarnation was a scuffle over public (read: your tax dollars and mine) funding of movies. Somebody conservative got in a huff about government having paid some indy producer to create a movie about something obnoxious, or about something innocuous done in an obnoxious way. That’s a pretty general description, but that’s because this “issue” keeps coming back with a new cause-celebre every couple of years.

Naturally enough, the arteeste community - and their fawning hangers-on - got all riled up about the possibility that the Philistines might take away funding for the always-hungry arts in (in this case) Canada. In particular, there was talk of either having a review board pick and choose which movies would get funded, or just stopping all government funding of movie-making. Some moron immediately began hollering “censorship!”.

If you are so lacking in intelligence and in basic English comprehension that you think deciding not to pay somebody to make a movie is censorship, then stop reading now, because the whole discussion is way above your head. Censorship is the forceful prevention of someone publishing their art or their commentary, or it’s the forceful prevention of people from seeing or hearing such art or other content.

Now, deciding to withhold your (or other people’s) largess from some artists, while granting it to others, might be unfair, but failure to provide someone with the means to publish their “speech” (written word, audio, video, satirical stage-play, painting, sculpture, dance… movie… whatever) is not the same as forcing them to stop. You can shit on the floor of the museum and call it art, but my unwillingness to pay you for it, and the museum’s unwillingness to have you ever come back is not censorship.

Still, if people are given control over how money is distributed to artists, then before long there will be more artists wanting money than there is money to give, so the people controlling the flow will necessarily begin exercising some kind of discretion. That is, they will have to establish some sort of criteria for giving money in one case and withholding it in another. Naturally, whoever isn’t picked will feel that they were unfairly excluded. If the money is the money of a private philanthropist, then too bad. They are entitled to set any criteria they please, or to just not give away any money this year, if nobody offers to do anything that pleases them.

If the money is tax dollars well, some taxpayers might have wanted to fund the poop-on-the-floor artist, while others want no part of such … crap. So then we have to start setting up all sorts of rules and published-in-advance criteria, and we have to have watchers/auditors to scrutinize the behavior of the people doing the choosing (managing the disbursement of the support-the-arts funds), and to scrutinize the funded projects to ensure that they actually meet the criteria under which the applications were made… and on and on it goes.

In the interest of fairness, political correctness, and other such ideals, the bureaucracy gets larger and ever-more convoluted - which means that it costs more and more, and takes longer to do its job. Instead of listening to (or reading simple proposals about) ideas for art, they busily introduce hoops to jump through, and they spend the rest of their days reading and validating enormously complicated proposal documentation. They’ve created all the forms and procedures to protect themselves. Either the eventual choices of who to fund must be scrupulously fair, or they must be so obscure and convoluted that nobody can really figure out how they were made. Does that sound like a _lot_ of government departments that you’ve encountered? It does to me. It sounds like the tax department. It sounds like the customs department. Immigration? Things don’t get much more convoluted and arcane than that. Well, I suppose there’s Indian Affairs - that’s in a class by itself… but we digress. Let’s get back to government funding of the arts.

The simple, obvious solution is to just stop giving away tax dollars for “the arts”. After all, one man’s chamber music festival is another man’s poop-on-the-floor. Or a mannequin clothed in rotting meat. Or a big canvas roller painted dark blue, with a red stripe up the middle (Voice of Fire) that the national gallery paid millions for… or movies glorifying child porn, and so on.

Oh my gawd, the artsy crowd wails. The city, the province, the country is suppressing the arts. The arts will die if artists and performers can’t count on public money (tax dollars) to support their efforts. Don’t let the Philistines win!

Bull-shit, of course. True artists produce art (poetry, prose, paintings, photographs, sculpture, plays, movies, music… poop) because they have to. They don’t have a choice. They are driven by the muse within.

If funding is taken away, the true artists don’t stop making art. Only the hacks, the charlatans, the bogus adepts of grantsmanship begin to dry up and fade away. The cons begin to look for other suckers. The chaff gets pared away and only the true talents and inspired creators are left to make art. And make art they do. It’s their nature. Truly creative and inspired people are burning with it. They can’t keep it in - it’s got to come out.

But the money doesn’t really stop, just because the tax dollars don’t flow. The wealthy and the not-so-wealthy have always patronized the arts with their own money, willingly given.

What if there’s not enough of that private money and money from endowments and foundations to go around? Some artists will starve! Well, what if that’s true? Didn’t some of the greatest artists of history produce their greatest work from the depths of poverty or madness? Maybe by keeping so many artists sucking at the public (tax-dollar) teat, we are preventing them from finding that focus, that clarity, that inner turmoil that produces great art.

Whenever funding gets tight, and artists of all sorts start to wail and moan, pay close attention to where the loudest noise is coming from. It’s coming from the empty barrels. It’s coming from the people of little or no talent or inspiration, who are in the art business only to make easy money. When the free money dries up, the real artists find day-jobs to feed themselves and to allow them to play their music or paint their canvases at night (or vice-versa - they wait tables at night so they can have the light of day to paint or sculpt). Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The true artist is dedicated to creating art, and will find a way. Finding a way, they will find a patron. A willing patron, not a bunch of sucker taxpayers who have better places to put their dollars.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright May 2008