The Imagination’s Subsidies: Whiners, Elites, Ordinary People, and the Economy

MARGARET AT WOOD'S MUCH CIRCULATED RESPONSE to Stephen Harper's massive and pointedly directed budget cuts to the arts just prior to the last election emphasizes the economic shortsightedness of Harper's move. While Atwood rightly notes that artists are ordinary people, that many ordinary people go to concerts and art galleries, buy CDS, read books, and perhaps even attend or perform opera, and that artists contribute to the economy to the tune of $46 billion, in my mind there is a deeper question to be asked. That question is: What is the relationship of the arts to the economy? If some of us believe that government ought to redirect private gains to fund the arts (that is, taxes on profits or income), we ought also to ask why we should allow our imaginations to support an economic system that privileges the greed of banks and other financial institutions against the interests of ordinary people. We tell ourselves a tale of economic progress and the rising value of property, and through deeper fictions about options, puts, futures, and derivatives, we make that progress happen--until the logic of the story collapses on itself, with dire material consequences. With all the shenanigans going on in Parliament to fix or not fix that particular fiction using taxpayers' dollars, how many of us ever stop to consider why we agree to imagine the economy as the centre of national life rather than see it as something that ought to serve the life of a national community? Should the arts be valued, in other words, just because they contribute $46 billion to the economy, or should we understand economic support for the arts as what one arena of public life should return to another in recognition of the extreme power that we, as citizens, through an extraordinary act of imagination give it: money equals not just time but objects, land, work, and ideas. This moment, when the material consequences of that act of imagination are being felt acutely, strikes me as a good one to reopen our agreement to it, or, at the very least, to re-open the form that agreement takes. It matters because our lives are enmeshed with the story of the economy. Thank goodness not all arts funding has been pulled--though with the knockout punch to TradeRoute and PromArts, much of that which allows Canadian artists to converse with artists and audiences internationally has. There are enough artists still around to ask about our relationships to the economy although it always boggles me why some of the most successful artists and writers I know live in such poverty, while the academics, civil servants, and corporate folk around me do not. What if we were to stop thinking about artists as the disposable excess of our society and begin to imagine them at its centre? How much different would our lives be if the economy served the arts instead of the other way around? At the very least, the spin that imagines Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire depriving Mary of her junior league hockey uniform or Tommy of his flute lesson has got to go. The painting may be boring, but I'd rather spend half a day on hold with Telus than listen to another facetious critique. Put Martin Gero's Young People Fucking, or just the name of the band Holy Fuck in place of Voice of Fire, and I'll throw myself in front of an Office Depot truck speeding down the 401. Seriously. Do people still spend entire Christmas dinners voluntarily having these conversations? The point is that using Voice of Fire or Young People Fucking as representative stand-ins for the arts in general ridiculously oversimplifies what artists do. It says a lot more about the speaker's anxieties about a) formalism and b) sex than it does about art. The choice of one or two pieces as usurpers of children's education disingenuously stupefies both the speaker and the arts. This was Atwood's critique. Typical attacks on government funding for the arts assume that ordinary people don't play or listen to music, make or watch movies, or read or write poems, short stories, and novels. …