The genie awards are a bizarre spectacle at the best of times. The nominees for best picture are a list of titles no one has seen, while the biggest-grossing film turns out to be some low-budget slasher or kiddie feature no one has heard of.

But if you saw this year's gala - and really, who can pass up that kind of excitement? - you were treated to a sight stranger still: Quebec producer Rock Demers, whose corpus includes some vastly profitable examples of the latter genre, delivering a stinging, trembling attack on the Tories, for not giving more money to the struggling Canadian film industry.

One sensed a feeling of emotional release. The audience stood and cheered. Donald Sutherland clapped. Martha Henry wept. Others rattled their jewelry. When the storm had subsided, the evening's co-host, actress Megan Follows, summed up the significance of what had gone before: ''Right on,'' she said.

Political statements are a regular feature at other awards shows, like the Oscars. But here's the difference: when American artists make a scene, it's for starving children, or native land claims, or the Sandinistas/PLO/ANC/(your popular front here). When Canadian artists do it, it's for themselves. This is because of our more elevated Canadian sense of compassion.

The film industry has found much to complain about in Tory arts policy, including such artistic concerns as tax reform's trimming of the capital cost allowance, and culminating in the hair-pulling over Flora MacDonald's long- delayed film distribution legislation.

The principle invoked was sovereignty: it was intolerable that film distribution in a sovereign nation should be so dominated by foreigners, a matter of honor that Canadian distributors have exclusive rights, if not to all films, at least to those Hollywood does not actually own outright.

Yet when the film bill arrived, to no one's surprise in wholly toothless form, this mortal wound to nationhood was somehow forgotten. Whatever protests the industry might have mounted were scarcely audible between the burps of satisfaction over the $200 million in government money shoveled its way. It was left to the Toronto press to summon outrage, with the usual interchangeable editorials.

There's nothing new in this, of course. The history of Canadian cultural nationalism is of the exploitation of the fears and hopes of the innocent for the profits of the self-interested. Even the Caplan-Sauvageau Commission could see that measures such as simultaneous transmission are designed to boost the profits of broadcasters, not to protect the fragile flower of Canadian culture.

My favorite example was the publishers' campaign against the tariff on imported books, imposed as a retaliatory measure in the shakes-and-shingles dispute with the U.S. How inspiring were the sermons against this interference in the free exchange of ideas - a measure which would, it appears, protect Canadian books.

Yet these same people were equally virulent in their denunciation of any move to lessen such equally protectionist interferences with free expression in the book trade as subsidies and ownership restrictions. The only difference was that the former measure tended to decrease publishers' profits, while the latter tended to increase publishers' profits.

But mere hypocrisy is no argument against anything. What ought to move us to renounce state subsidies for the arts is the essentially anti-aesthetic nature of such activity. It depends whether you think a work of art is a thing created, or a thing constructed. If art is creation, not construction, then the relationship between the artist and his audience, the aesthetic experience, begins not with the finished product, but at the point of conception, when the work of art is first called forth into being.

As such, it must involve the free choice of both artist and audience to engage each other in such contract, a choice made meaningful only when each sacrifices something to the other. To pay cash for art is not to materialize it: it is in fact a profoundly antimaterialistic act of self-denial, forgoing the goods and services that money could have bought.

To allow state agencies to collect and distribute tax money, on the other hand, destroys that element of free individual sacrifice. To do so in the belief that not ''enough'' art would otherwise be produced is truly to make of art an industry, churned out like munitions in wartime. Culture as quota is the purest philistinism.

This is not, then, an argument for a marketplace aesthetic. It is only a plea for voluntarism, for the renunciation of coercion in support of artistic endeavor, for the restoration of that bond between artist and community which cannot coexist with the bondage of the artist to the state.

Until we rescue the idea of art as creation from art as construction, we shall not find our common voice, and Canadian art will remain, all protests to the contrary, at some profound remove alien to its people. For as that wisest of journalists, G. K. Chesterton, once wrote, ''a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.''