Yesterday some time, Kathryn Marshall fired back against the angry letters, emails and critical writing that we have been amassing on the internet against her widely disputed interview with Ezra Levant. The link is posted below to her personal blog so you can read it for yourself. Megan Dart pointed it out to me this morning, and I had a chance to read it, go grab a cup of tea and think on it.
First off, Marshall did not address in any way, shape nor form the inaccuracies of her broadcast, which have been pointed out by Matt Schuurman and Ben Eastep. Again to reiterate, the images they use aren't even the right building. ArtsHab is a subsidized housing project, it's not free. Artists pay 775 dollars a month, plus utilities. You can't just "draw a couple sketches" call yourself an artist and live there, there is a residence board which presides over each tenant, and you are required to be an artist who has been noted by a council of peers to be considered. This does not mean some high schooler with a paintbrush, you must be a professional artist in the career working full time on developing your craft.
I think first of all, that many of the right-wing attacks I've seen both on the youtube clip, and from voices pro-interview tame umbrage against the idea of housing for artists. I submit to them, that they are looking at the time frame of this 'housing' in a particularly skewed light. This housing, for the most part is not permanent living. At least not in so far that anyone is probably going to live there for the next 15 years. It is not a replacement for a house. Rather for many artists, I expect it's more of a stop gap, an affordable place to live for a few months or a year while a project is underway, or some training is undertaken, or during a particularly studious time in an artists career. The existence of subsidized housing is not a "have a free home", rather it should be viewed more as "stay with our community for a while, get on your feet". No artist that I know of, if they already have a house, is going to sell it and move into the hab. And while we're on the subject, of my close peers, exactly three of them own their own houses, everyone else rents.
To get to the meat of my post, Marshall posted again, or reiterated her question, "What makes art so special?" Evidently it's easier to attack the dignity of an artist than to defend one's own journalistic practice, but I digress.
What makes art so special?
One person responded to Marhsall with "Because it has the power to change the world," assuredly it does, but that's not going to move that woman, I hazard to guess. "Because it's in everything we see and do in a day already" well and good, also true, but any semi-competent right wing debater will point out if it's already there, then it should be paid for. "Because it binds communities together, helps us discover shared culture, link people together and grant us a wealth of experiences." This is the core of my philosophy as an artist, but I see how problematic it is.
The truth is that there is an important value judgement for us to recognize here. A true right wing, capitalist, will say that art should not be publically funded. They will say that any art of good enough merit should be profitable for the artist, or else why do it. If you paint a painting that cannot be sold, then it's not worth anything, let alone enough to let an artist subsist on. For them, thus 'good' artists will rise to the top, and 'bad' artists will disappear. Capitalism.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, and probably in many more artists minds, that's not the way to approach art. Sheer fiscality of individual pieces of art is a poor measure. The problem comes from the intangible benefits that come from art. I'm talking about social, and cultural benefits. I'm talking about historic benefits. In 2010 I wrote a play about the Armenian Genocide, as relates to us as Canadians today. Namely the play deals with characters growing up in a world where the memory of history has a profound weight on their lives.
I am not interested in making a profit from it. I'm not interested in selling it as a book tour (even if it were good enough) or selling it to some publisher or theatre festival or even producing company. Instead, I wrote that play for a group people so they could sit with me and, research, read, and parttake in a part of their history, they could ask questions. While I'm not an expert by any stretch of the means, that play got them interested in learning more about difficult questions, like collective guilt, social debt, and atrocity experiences.
The thing is that for every Katy Perry, there are probably a dozen 'artists' who are doing work that is not fiscally sound. They're doing it for reasons that are not financial. They're doing it to reach out to communities. Doing it to educate the youth, and adults, to bring cultural experience to each other, what if we had no culinary art, what if we had no sculpture or architecture, theatre or music, paintings, design, or dance? Because sushi is fiscally popular right now, does that mean we should all forget how to cook Ecuadorian cuisine? Because you like coffee, does that mean I needs forget how to steep tea?
No.
That's the difficult part to swallow for any artist. If all art is valued only by its market price, by only how much someone will be willing to pay for it, it's true you will have a slimming of the industry. But it will also become flatter, less vibrant. A number of projects artists take on are not profitable, they are about saving lives through dance or music, about telling stories, about sharing history. What if all the stories of the Holocaust didn't exist, were not told through art, were not explained or expressed. What if Hana's Suitcase never was, and those children were never given the opportunity to express themselves?
What makes art so sacred?
I submit that art is not special. It simply is. It exists, in both time and space, as well as intangibility. It is memory, shared experience, storytelling, community building. Every culture, every society, every nation has art. I learned far more about Chinese art and painting before I ever embraced a Western tradition of Theatre. Art is a method of educating, passing history, sensory experience. Why should it be government funded? Because we want more art, not less. We want more experiences, we want more stories, we want more questions and smarter children and more culture. We want more art to adorn our public spaces, more choices for music, more symphonies, more dance, not just ballet and hiphop, but jazz, and modern too. We want more languages, more books, more words and more ideas.
Is that so hard to understand? I'm a tax paying Canadian too. Because you pay more taxes than me are you MORE Canadian? Is our social stratification broken because you have a 9-5 job, and mine is from noon to 6 in the morning? Somehow I work longer hours, get paid less, pay less in taxes and my voice is worth less? I want these things, as a Canadian citizen. I want children to listen to more than just pop music, I want my friends to see opera and hear a symphony, to view paintings in galleries and attend theatre openings. I want more of these things, Canadian films and television, sculpture, more Canadian writings and writers. I don't want more missiles, or more jet fighters. Is my opinion less valid than yours?
I was messaged by someone from the youtube clip, telling me that to boycott Sun News Network meant I was against freedom of speech. I'm not against freedom of speech, I thought I was exercising mine? Is my speech somehow less valid than yours because you earn twice as much money?
What makes art so special. Is it worth less than forestry or oil and gas because half of what we make is intangible? Because at the end of the day you get a barrel of crude to sell to a foreign market that makes it worth more? I don't care about a barrel of crude oil...in fact if one showed up on my doorstep right now I probably wouldn't know what to do about it. Why do oil companies get a 1.4 billion dollar tax break, and we're up in arms over a building?
What makes art so sacred? I don't know, I've meandered around and through the subject for the better part of an hour, and now I need to get back to making it.
Oh wait, parting shot. What makes art so sacred? Probably nothing other than that everything in life is sacred and isn't at the same time. Just like journalistic integrity. Zing.
Marhsall's post here.
http://www.kathrynmarshall.ca/arts-funding/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-subsidized-artist-criticized
Don't bother responding to it there though, in true right-wing fashion, I've been watching her, or someone managing it for her delete any comments questioning her reasoning. Yay censorship!
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