By Andrew Coyne
"WE WORK in the dark --" writes Henry James in The Middle Years, "we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
We make art because we can, or rather because we are. Granted creation, we cannot help creating; forbidden to know the meaning of creation, we seek it or scorn it in art. "All art is a revolt against man's fate," wrote André Malraux. "Each of the masterpieces is a purification of the world, but their common message is that of their existence and the victory of each individual artist over his servitude ..."
Madness, passion, doubt, task, give, do, work. You may search in vain to hear art spoken of in such terms in Canada. In fact, it is hard to find much discussion about art, per se, at all. Read the arts section of any metropolitan newspaper on any given day. Mostly, it is about politics: whose grants were cut, which arts lobbying group wants what, and what the minister of culture says about it all. It is about gender representation, and voice appropriation, and cultural sovereignty. Or else it is about economics: about tax writeoffs and union rules, ownership controls and content regulations, or (the rationale du jour) culture's contribution to employment. The one thing it is almost never about is art.
All of this is carried on in the usual deathwatch tones that mark all discussions of Canadian culture. The slightest setback for any section of what have come to be called "the cultural industries" is the signal for a great collective keening in the nation's press, a kind of ritual theatre in which the same lament is endlessly repeated: Canadian culture is dying, defeated, doomed, and all for the want of a few government dollars. "For the last two decades, Canadian culture has been obsessed with its own death," the critic Robert Fulford has written. "This melodramatic approach keeps cultural bureaucrats and politicians alert and for journalists has the further advantage of being easy to report. Editors (perhaps readers, too) may respond with more interest to a piece about the Canada Council's dwindling budget than to an essay explaining the power of Mavis Gallant's new book."
It is especially easy when the reportage amounts to writing exactly the same thing every day. Most arts reporters consider it the whole of their duty to instill in the reader the proper devotional attitude to state support of the arts -- a task to which they set themselves with dedication, if not enthusiasm. As a rule, it is considered unnecessary to give space to the other side, or even to acknowlege that one might exist. One might as well suggest presenting "the other side" of an airline safety demonstration. And yet, one is dimly aware that it must exist, somewhere, else why this edgy insistence?
Despite, or because of this perpetual dirge, governments at every level continue to pour funds into the arts, at a massive pace. After what one would take from the media to be an unrelenting decade-long campaign of aerial bombardment of Canadian culture, the state still contributes more than $3-billion every year to its upkeep: $6-billion, counting libraries, galleries and national parks. The money is available not only for expensive or "high" arts like opera, the traditional recipients of subsidy abroad. In Canada, we subsidize everything. Movies, theatre, television; painting, sculpture; music, dance; books, magazines, even the odd newspaper: all of it. We subsidize rock groups.
Consider the case of the publishing industry. The author of a book might receive a subsidy to write it. The book will be put out by means of a subsidy to the publisher. It will pass through subsidized distributors to subsidized bookstores by subsidized mail, whereupon it will be reviewed in subsidized magazines, perhaps eventually to be the subject of subsidized academic research. And many more people will receive subsidies to write feelingly of why this circle of subsidy must continue. Perhaps it's time for a fresher view.
ACTUALLY, THE new, "economic" arguments for government support of the arts, cranked out semi-weekly in reports from various sections of the arts bureaucracy and faithfully relayed to us through the press, are not that new at all. If franker than usual in arguing for subsidy on the same terms as every other industry -- for the jobs created and the income generated, always ignoring the jobs destroyed and income lost in the process of diverting resources from less favoured industries -- they are not that far removed from those exquisites who insist that culture must not be soiled by exposure to mere commerce. For as much as those in the arts are in the habit of proclaiming that culture is above economics -- "art isn't the same as widgets, you know" -- they invariably rely on economic arguments to make their case: not in the bottom-line sense of dollars and jobs, but in the broader sense of how a society makes choices in the use of scarce resources.
The economist and art-lover William Grampp summarizes the case this way, in Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1989): "Art costs more and is worth more than the public at large is willing to pay for it. Because of its cost, it is unable to support itself, and because of what it is worth it should not be asked to support itself." That, stripped of the bad-tempered rhetoric, is more or less the gist of every argument for arts subsidies. It is understandable that their advocates should know nothing about economics; what is more distressing is how little they seem to know or care about art.
Of course art is "not the same as widgets," in the sense that it yields its own particular sort of satisfaction. It is still an activity for which costs are incurred, prices are paid, and competing wants must be resolved. I'll believe that art is not like widgets in this sense the day I see artists refuse payment for their work -- to say nothing of the mob of hucksters, middlemen and bureaucrats that have inserted themselves in the ever-widening gulf between artist and audience. It is one thing to say that civilized people should support the arts. It is quite another to say that such support must be expressed through the state.
Subsidies do not grow on trees. They are paid for by taxes, which people are required by law to pay. Sometimes this is justified. But this has to be demonstrated, not asserted. It is not enough to recite endless variations on the theme that Art is Good. Lots of things are Good, but not all of them are publicly funded. Spiritual salvation is surely at least as Good as art. Yet not only is there no public support for state funding of religion, there would be loud protests if it were ever suggested. The church endures all the same.
The church was disestablished on the grounds that there was no single universally agreed path to salvation. But neither is there a single universally agreed standard of aesthetic value. That does not mean there is no such thing as artistic merit, any more than there is no such thing as religious truth: only that no one view can claim unchallenged possession of it. If a man does not care for art, we are entitled to despise him as a boor. We are not entitled to take his money. Or if we do, we might at least give him a good reason why, other than the obvious fact that we want to.
The good reason for public spending is for "public goods": those goods (or services) the consumption of which cannot be restricted to those who have paid for it, and for which it is hence impossible to charge a price. Where pricing is possible, consumer preferences are revealed; if there is sufficient demand for the good, private providers will supply it. But where enough people can get the benefits of a good or service without having to pay for it -- the dreaded "free riders" -- the danger is that the good will not be provided, or not enough of it will be, since each may choose not to pay in the belief that others will. So far as one may be sure that those who do not choose to pay for a good are in fact benefiting from it, it is justifiable to collect payment by taxation to the amount of the benefit.
There are few cases in the arts in which these conditions apply. It is almost always possible to charge a price to consumers, whether for a painting or a book, a live performance or a recording. (The main exception until now has been television, but the advent of pay-per-view has made even that obsolete.) If subsidy proponents think in these terms at all, they have a hard time explaining why those who do not care for the arts should be forced to pay for the enjoyment of those who do. Though many have been claimed, it is not at all clear what real benefits those who don't go to the theatre, for example, get from those who do, or why we should take it on faith that these "externalities" are worth more than those of other putative public goods, each with its own case for subsidy.
Even if a benefit to those not present might be conjectured on their behalf -- if they do not appreciate the benefit now, perhaps they will in time -- it bumps up against the uncomfortable democratic fact that the subjects themselves do not share in the conjecture. At which point the case for subsidy starts to look alarmingly like the case for theft. Sometimes this is bravely defended as paternalism. Bravely, and wrongly. If a group of high-minded citizens sponsor artistic works with their own money for the benefit of the unenlightened, that is paternalism. The usual pattern of subsidy, rather, is to take money from the unenlightened for the benefit of the high-minded.
WHEN I say that not "enough" of something might be provided, I mean not as much as people might want and be willing to pay for. When people in the cultural industries fret that, in the absence of subsidy, not "enough" art would be created, they mean any amount less than is created now. This is implicit in arguments for subsidy that celebrate the fact that, indeed, concurrent with the growth of subsidy has been an extraordinary expansion in artistic activity in Canada. That we are invited to bemoan the corollary -- less subsidy, less art -- reveals the essentially philistine premise that lurks within: More art is better art. Do I exaggerate? Listen to Walter Pitman, former chairman of the Ontario Arts Council: "The more art there is, the better it is."
The results of this quantitative theory of aesthetics are all around us: what the cultural historian Jacques Barzun has decried as the "glut of art." The author and critic John Metcalf, in his scalding attack on literary subsidies, Freedom From Culture (Vancouver: Tanks, 1987), noted that there were more than 4,000 professional writers registered with the Public Lending Right Commission in this country. (Four thousand! Balzac lamented that there were 2,000 painters in nineteenth-century Paris, but 4,000 Canadian writers....)
It gets worse. Since 1981, the cultural labour force has been growing more than twice as fast as the general work force, roughly 3 per cent per year. More than 670,000 Canadians told the 1991 Census that they were mainly employed in the cultural sectors. Of these, 348,160 reported a "cultural occupation" as their primary employment. These included 11,815 architects, 11,450 painters and sculptors, about 30,000 designers, 28,715 illustrators, 12,330 photographers and camera operators, 15,165 producers and directors, 11,650 musicians and singers, 1,635 composers, conductors and arrangers, 1,445 dancers and choreographers, 4,125 actors and actresses, 26,670 fine arts teachers and fully 41,550 writers and editors. By any reasonable definition, then, Canada now has close to 200,000 full-time professional artists -- 200,000 people trying to make a living, let alone a reputation, as artists, and more joining them all the time. (An ominous portent: More than 50,000 Canadians in 1992 reported taking acting lessons in the previous year.)
They can't, of course. But they are sustained in the illusion by the continual ingestion of government grants, from multiple sources: the enterprising grant-seeker in Toronto can call upon four different levels of government for support. Canada's performing arts organizations, in particular, rely on the state for between one-third and one-half of their revenues. Even the theatre, the most commercial of the performing arts, earned just slightly more from ticket sales ($70 million, in 1992-93) than from grants ($62 million). Every year, the state in Canada pours roughly $50-million into the production of painting and sculpture, $190-million for literature, $320-million for the performing arts, $330-million for film, video and sound recording, and $1.7-billion on radio and television broadcasting -- not counting the millions more extorted from private broadcasters as a condition of licence. The Canada Council, with a budget of around $100-million, had a list of clients in 1992-93 that included, in addition to 36 orchestras, 160 publishers, 37 dance companies, 65 film and video producers, and some 100 magazines, more than two dozen arts service organizations -- the Writers Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association of Women Composers, and so on -- groups that exist mainly to lobby government for more support.
As Barzun notes, "an oversupply of art does not lower prices or cause the artist to 'give up the business.' It only augments the need for subsidies.... We can pay farmers not to grow crops, but we cannot pay artists to stop making art." The swollen ranks of the subsidized depletes not only the share of public funds available to each: there is an inevitable drawing-down of critical standards to accommodate them all. It is simply too much to bear to think that so much effort and resources, so much well-meaning and "creativity," should have been wasted. But of course, most of it is. Almost all the art that has ever been created, in all times and all places, is so much surplus tissue: gone, forgotten, and deservedly so. Mediocrity is the great constant of human existence.
That so many people might be prevented from pursuing their chosen careers without ready access to the taxpayer's wallet is perhaps a personal tragedy. It is not, however, an argument for subsidy. Quite simply, not everyone who wants to be an artist should be. The pitiless truth is that most people aren't very good at their jobs, including Prime Ministers, journalists and artists. Whether or not one goes so far as to say, with Metcalf, that less art would be better art ("above all," said Degas, "we must discourage the arts") it is certainly not true that more art is better art. More art is more art.
A more sophisticated variant of the subsidy case is, not so much that less art would be created without subsidy, but that what was created would be of the wrong kind -- mass-market, lowest-common-denominator, McCulture, name your cliché: all Phantom, all the time. Of course in one sense this is self-evidently true, if what is popular is simply defined to be "the wrong kind." More often it merely reflects an assumption -- unstated, unexamined, often unconscious -- that popular taste must inevitably fail to appreciate the highest artistic achievements, a sometimes self-serving position firmly rooted in the Romantic fallacy: some great artists died penniless, therefore all penniless artists are great.
Rather than too-quickly frame the debate simply as a battle of elite versus popular taste, however, we might first ask why, even if the public are such boobs, we should so completely ignore the role of the private patron: that is, one who supports an artist or his work out of all proportion to any immediate satisfaction he might obtain in exchange, whether out of a philanthropic concern for artistic excellence, or with a more entrepreneurial eye for art that has not found its audience yet but may in time, on the theory that popular taste is not so much low as slow. The case for the government as patron amounts to saying that the hirelings of the state, spending other people's money, will do a better job of picking art than private patrons, spending their own. "They tell me we have no literature now in France," said Louis Napoleon. "I will speak to the Minister of the Interior about it."
But surely the presumption, if any, should be the reverse: "If I am thinking of buying a painting," writes Metcalf, "I will look at it with all the intensity, experience and knowledge that I can bring to bear. All my faculties will be sharpened by the prospect of imminently parting with a goodly sum of my own money. If I am buying a painting for you, a friend, on your behalf, it is almost inevitable that I will be slightly less rigorous and less demanding... Consider now what happens when I am buying not one but several paintings. And I am buying them not with my money and not with your money but with that abstraction called 'public' money. And I know that all that money must be spent." Paintings or plays or songs or books: the argument applies with equal force.
What is the evidence for the contrary proposition, that left to private choices, art would wither? Subsidy advocates like to reel off the names of great artists of the past who were beneficiaries of the state, as if that settled the matter: Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo; Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner; Shakespeare and Moliere. This does not get us far: Whoever said they weren't? Yet proponents of subsidy seem often to imply, if they do not believe it themselves, that no art worth the name could possibly be produced without subsidy. Put as baldly as that, they may deny it: but it is the rhetorical theme playing under countless arguments. Do I exaggerate again? Critic Paul Goldberger, in the New York Times, summarizes the common view, in suitably sweeping tones: "Culture has never been able to support itself," he writes. "The marketplace has never been a testing ground for artistic validity; history shows few correlations between what is popular enough to pay for itself and what is good enough to last." Or listen to Ray Conlogue of the Globe and Mail. "Since the Renaissance, memorable art has been subsidized one way or the other." The review of Metcalf's Freedom From Culture in Poetry Canada Review was entitled "A Sea of Harlequins." Similar examples could be harvested in abundance.
Very well: two can play at that game. What do Beethoven's symphonies, Picasso's paintings and Joyce's novels have in common? All are recognized masterworks, and all were created without a shilling or a sou of state support. (Oh all right: Joyce once received a grant of 75 pounds from the Royal Literary Fund.) The idea that state subsidy was the norm of artistic creation is so contrary to historical fact it is difficult to know where to start. Shall we take, I don't know, the Ds? Dante, Delacroix, Dostoevsky, Dvorak. Or should we play categories -- say, French writers of the 19th century? Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo. Not a subsidy in the lot. The state was nowhere part of the rise of the novel, or photography, or film, it had no hand in jazz, blues, folk or country music, or indeed in most of the painting, sculpture, music or poetry that has ever been created: for beyond those produced for sale stretches that immense body of art that belongs to the private or household realm, made neither for the state nor for the market, but solely for the enjoyment of the artist and his immediate circle.
Any honest survey of the past will in fact find every combination, in every field: great artists who were supported by the state, great artists who weren't; bad artists who were popular favourites, and some just as wretched who were favourites of the court; great artists who were shunned and went hungry, great artists who were honoured and rich; and of course the numberless mediocrities who lived, worked, died and were instantly forgotten.
But certainly there is no evidence to support the ignorant myth that art, if it is worthwhile, must inevitably elude an audience: that obscurity is depth, that odium is merit. Take literature, for starters. The writers of the past we most admire today, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Balzac, Dickens and Goethe, were not typically the preserve of the select: they were popular favourites in their own time.
Or take music. Haydn left the suffocating security of his continental patron for England and the risks of the open market: he was a huge hit. Mozart, too, prospered by his pen between patrons. Forced to retire from a lucrative performing career by the onset of his deafness, Beethoven groused "I am obliged to live entirely on the profits from my compositions." But that is exactly what he did. Even opera, the ne plus ultra of art-that-must-be-subsidized, was once a thriving industry: as early as the 17th century, there were ten opera houses in Venice alone. In the 18th and 19th centuries, opera occupied the affections of the Italian public in a way that only sports can match today, with rival entrepreneurs competing ferociously for audiences and performers. To be sure, they produced a lot of dreck. They also produced Verdi.
A notable commercial acumen has indeed been characteristic of some of the greatest artists in the canon. The summer bestseller in 1532 was a story about a family of giants in Arthurian times. Impressed by its sales, the then-unknown Rabelais stole its cast of characters and ground out a "sequel" -- Pantagruel -- to even greater success. Shakespeare not only acted in the plays he wrote, but was an investor in the company, entitled to as much as 14 per cent of the gate. He died a wealthy man, owner of the fanciest house in Stratford. Reynolds got his first work as a portraitist by cunningly pricing his paintings just below those of his teacher. Wordsworth, author of the chart-topping Lyrical Ballads, served tea to admirers in his home -- and charged for it. Rubens was known to add or subtract scenes from his work as his customers preferred. After audiences hissed at the plain dress of the heroine in the first staging of La Traviata, Verdi revived the show with the cast dressed in the style of the court of Louis XIII, and turned a flop into a hit. Beethoven often sold the same pieces to several publishers. Stravinsky insisted on conducting his own works, so as not to have to split the fee. "Get this into your head," said Renoir. "There's only one indicator for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sale room."
The same holds true today. Grampp cites research done in the 1970s by the German art writer Willi Bongard, who collected and quantified data reflecting expert opinion on contemporary artists -- 300 points for each work shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 200 points for a lesser museum like the Stedelijk in Amsterdam; 50 points for a mention in Art Actual, 10 points for Connaissance des Arts, and so on. (Sure, it's a bit arbitrary, but it's as good a system as any.) Correlating Bongard's rankings with the price of a representative piece by each of the artists, Grampp is able to show "that the price of the work of the principal living artists of the world is consistent with the critical judgment that has been made of them."
And so on across the arts, from high to low. As the critic Joseph Epstein has observed, "a substantial commercial success has set the final seal on some of the most admired artists of our time." Indeed, one is tempted to say that popular taste as often leads elite taste as follows. The most famous story of a group of artists who were supposedly "ahead of their time," the impressionists and post-impressionists, in fact confirms the opposite. While they were indeed spurned by the Academy, and though they were at first sustained by a few sympathetic dealers and friends, it was the public that came to their rescue. Indeed, the modern art market may be said to have coincided with the arrival of the impressionists, or rather with the American collectors, flush with cash and hungry for European art, who devoured them -- their prices being the cheaper for having been excluded from the salon.
Or look at it another way. It is true that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime (Cézanne and Renoir were among those who hated his work). It did not seem to prevent him from painting.
WHAT IS clear, moreover, is that the state patronage of the past is in no way comparable to the arts funding of today, in its methods, objectives, or beneficiaries. It was generally given in exchange for a service the artist's work was expected to perform, whether in the religious or political message it propounded or the pleasure it afforded the patron. It was more in the nature of a commission than a grant: its purpose rooted in the work itself, not in the promotion of "the arts" in general or the self-actualization of the artist. As Milton Cummings and Richard Katz argue in The Patron State: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), "patronage rarely consisted of unconditional support for the artist to create. Rather, patronage meant employment for a particular period or on a particular product that the patron wanted, and if the patron was not satisfied he had the option of all buyers to take his business elsewhere." The charismatic ideal of the artist, alone with his genius, had not yet been invented.
Indeed, the very concept of "the arts" as a category separable from the everyday arts of life is a fairly recent innovation. "Until the nineteenth century," writes John Pick in The Arts in a State: A Study of Government Arts Policies from Ancient Greece to the Present (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1988), "the word 'arts' in English had referred to all of those things which gave anyone benefit or pleasure, whether they were performed by professionals or amateurs, in the privacy of the home or in public, with or without an audience of onlookers. 'The arts' referred to a range of skills, from the ability to join in the conversation in the local tavern to building a pleasant and functional cottage."
This idea, of art as craft, is a humbler notion than what we have become used to. Yet it produced some of the most cherished works of the human hand and mind. For "just as most citizens in the widest sense of the term enjoyed the arts, so most citizens participated in some degree in those evaluative processes which estimated their worth... Then in the nineteenth century that common sense flew apart. 'Art' separated itself off from crafts, from design, from sport, from pastimes and from entertainment, and became something which professionals did, and which could only be comprehended by an educated minority." Yet the participation of the vulgar public seems to have been an element in some of the greatest ages of art the world has known.
The art historian Richard Goldthwaite is among those heretics who have suggested this was not coincidental. In Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600, Goldthwaite credits the Renaissance with the discovery of "things," along with antiquity, nature, man and the individual. "The venture of Italians into the world of goods ... marked the first stirring of what today is called consumerism..."
Spurred by a booming mercantile economy, the art market developed at much the same time and in much the same way as the market for other goods, and with the same impulse to conspicuous consumption. Italian businessmen made materialism their religion; the pieces they commissioned for their own aggrandizement were the secular equivalent of the devotional works that graced the local duomo. Sometimes the two worlds overlapped: Florence in the quattrocento boasted more than 600 private chapels, each decorated to taste. Eventually, the first private art collections were formed. "By enshrining these objects in museums," Goldthwaite argues, "we pay homage to the luxury consumption of the past and thereby reverently celebrate the passion for spending for things that keeps the capitalist system of the West going."
The same twined flourishing of culture and commerce can be observed in northern Europe in the 17th century, the extraordinary Golden Age that gave us Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and de Hooch, all painting for private customers. And again the next century in Britain, where state patronage was all but unknown. According to Pick, "the market ... for good writing, good music and good art, together with the scale of participation in music, dancing, painting and literature was larger than it had ever been before or has been since."
The arts were "not spread out through the population as a kind of bland service"; rather, "critical participation within the culture spread along with the means of creative participation." The debates were fierce, the coffee houses were filled. "Because art was not provided in response to needs perceived by bureaucrats, but was a part of ordinary living and hence nurtured and evaluated by the straightforward wants of people, the new and thriving world of commercial art did not mean any lowering of standards to satisfy some supposed low level of popular taste." Artist and audience each raised the other to a higher level, like mountaineers rappelling up a rock face.
There was a time, indeed, when even in Canada, the arts had not yet been captured by the bureaucrats. It is simply untrue that Canadian culture began with the Canada Council or the Massey Commission. As the late George Woodcock, no foe of either, noted in Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada [Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1985]: "the myth that the Canada Council in itself inspired the artistic flowering of the past quarter of a century or so is untenable." Callaghan and MacLennan, the Group of Seven and Painters Eleven, all predate the Council; the Stratford Festival, the regional theatres, the National Ballet, the Canadian Opera Company, the municipal orchestras were already up and running on private money and volunteer enthusiasm without the help of the Council. "It is obvious that a great movement in the arts was gathering impetus before the council appeared, and would have continued with or without patronage, generating its own flow of interest and -- though doubtless on a less lavish scale -- created its own economic base."
If, as a nation, we had not until then shown much taste for the arts, it was no less evident in our public than in our private lives; if we were now evincing more interest, the arrival of state support was less a cause than a result. Nor can the state take automatic credit for what successes there have been since. Margaret Atwood, for example, was not first published with the help of subsidy: her first book of poems was privately published by a friend, her second by the unsubsidized Contact Press, her third by the Oxford University Press. The most revered figures in Canadian popular music, likewise, from Joni Mitchell to Neil Young, hit the charts long before Canadian content requirements were legislated. "When one remembers how similar was the development of an independent tradition a couple of generations earlier in the United States," Woodcock wrote, "it is hard to believe that in its broad outline the situation would have been greatly different in Canada today if the Canada Council ... had not come into being."
IF HISTORY does not point to the necessity of subsidy, the present does not offer much evidence of its success -- in terms of quality, that is, not of quantity.
The practical effects of Canada's extensive system of subsidies and other protective devices have been attacked by a growing band of critics. They point out that much of what nestles under the wing of the state in the name of the starving artist is profitable enterprise undertaken by multi-billion dollar corporations; that much of what is legislated in the name of Canadian culture is ineffective or counterproductive; that it has created a closed, clubby, self-indulgent community of back-scratchers, log-rollers and hangers-on, a hothouse culture requiring cadres of bureaucrats to administer, in the name of "accountability," ethnic representation and other good things. Of these even subsidy proponents are uneasily aware; yet the system might still be defended as beneficial on balance, its faults amenable to correction, so long as its basic premises were sound.
In the end, rather, we come back to the relationship between the artist and the audience, and what each owes to the other and to art. If it is not always true that what is popular is good, neither is it true that good art can never be popular. A work of art may still have merit even if it fails to find an audience, but art defeats its purpose if it does not at least seek one. The artist, wrote Conrad, appeals "to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation ... to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity ... which binds together all humanity, the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." Books are written to be read, pictures are painted to be seen, now and for all time: they are the manifests of that solidarity.
If that is so, then the question is whether the relationship between artist and audience begins with the completed work, or at the moment of its conception -- with the choice of which works of art should be created. If the latter, then it is inextricably bound up with the method of its financing, for that will determine which artists are at work, and which works they create. As much as the artist, the paying audience is present at the creation. That is the moment when, in a sense, each chooses the other as collaborators in the aesthetic experience.
This is not an argument for simply "giving people what they want." In most areas of commerce, the consumer is under no obligation but to consume. It is for the producer to divine what the consumer wants, and to give it to him; the wants themselves are by and large taken as a given. But if economics does not pass judgment on the merits of those wants, other disciplines may. In aesthetic terms, the consumer of a work of art has an obligation no less than that of the artist: the burden of taste.
Still... Democracy is a system that "gives people what they want." Sometimes the result is appalling, sometimes uplifting. Its practitioners may interpret "giving the people what they want" in higher or lower terms, appealing as they choose to the best in us or the worst. Whether either succeeds will depend on their skill and our mood, but neither result could of itself be said to typify democracy. It is not true that democracy always means demagoguery, and the chance that it may is not generally regarded as sufficient argument for doing away with democracy. If anything, the remedy for democracy's ills is more democracy: the more people practice making choices, the better they get. Individual choice is the school of self-government, as it is the school of moral judgment -- and of taste.
Metcalf writes, "a literature is a relationship." A work of art, then, is a conversation. Here, look at this, the artist says: I think it's beautiful, or true, or at any rate interesting. What do you think? Perhaps a work has value even if nobody values it. But how would we know? It is not enough for the artist simply to declare its worth. He must at least open it to public debate. He must expose himself to the choices of his audience, and hope to persuade them of its merits. So far as subsidy insulates him from this requirement, it lessens the obligation to speak directly to his audience, in favour of a committee of his "peers." One half of the collaboration is lost.
But if the consumer is to do his part, he must make an "investment in taste," in Grampp's phrase, with which to winnow the false from the true, the shallow from the profound, the shoddy from the well-made. He will not have made that investment until he makes his own choices with his own money. Only when he is a conscious participant in the sacrifice this entails will it be worth his while to devote the time and study needed to get the most out of the experience: price not only rations consumption, it intensifies it. That can never happen so long as such choices are made for him by the state.
Perhaps this mutual obligation makes art different from other goods. Or perhaps not. The price we are willing to pay for a chair, for instance, is based on more than strict functionality. That part of its value we ascribe to the aesthetic pleasure it yields makes the purchase a transaction in art. No subsidy is needed to encourage the production of beautiful chairs. It requires only demanding and knowledgeable clients, who have taken the time and expense to cultivate a taste. They do so because it matters to them, and it matters to them, in part, because of what it costs: the chair that glittered in the light of momentary fashion becomes in time an expensive reminder of past folly. If nothing cost anything, we would have no need to be choosy: if we did not like something at any given moment, we could simply throw it out and pick up another. Consciousness of cost instills a respect for things that last and values that transcend: it increases the returns to an investment in taste.
There is no inherent tendency to vulgarity in the market, for the simple reason that there is not one market, but several. It may be that most people are vulgar, but it is not necessary that most people buy a good for it to be produced. It only takes one, provided he or she is willing to pay the price. Or if a buyer cannot be found, it depends solely on the desire of its creator. If the market is a democracy, it is not one where the majority rules: every taste may be represented, no matter how few its enthusiasts. Would there be fewer symphonies, fewer operas, fewer plays without subsidy? Or would they just carry a stiffer ticket price? The answer depends strictly on whether their supporters are willing to put their money where their mouths are. Suppose an unsubsidized ticket to the opera cost $150. Would the average opera-goer blanch at this? The same people will pay $150 to a scalper for Leafs tickets, or for a silk shirt, or for Nintendo, things they would profess not to care much about. Why shouldn't they do the same for things they do care about?
Subsidizing the creation of art, then, dulls both parties' awareness of the other, and so impairs the formation of an aesthetic bond between them. To make art a thing of exchange, on the other hand, is not to "commodify" it: quite the opposite. In paying for a work of art, we are explicitly choosing to forgo the worldly goods the same money would have purchased. Artist and audience freely pledge the fruits of their labour to each other. It is a kind of communion, the transubstantiation of commonplace wants into art.
This is plainly not to say that all art produced with subsidy yields any claim to merit merely by virtue of its receipt. We are only talking of tendencies, of probabilities, of the likely effects over time of a system of funding artistic creation that is divorced from the choices and experiences of its audience. To defend the separation of art and state is not to worship at the shrine of "the market," or to treasure efficiency and profit in place of truth and beauty. It is only a plea for voluntarism, in the belief that art, of all things, cannot be the fruit of coercion.
We would not, after all, conscript artists to create art. Why then should we conscript the public to support it?
CODA: ON CULTURAL NATIONALISM
There is another, entirely separable argument for state support of the arts, especially in the mass media. Here the fear is not so much that the public, left to themselves, would fail to support the arts, but that they might not choose to support Canadian art. The "wrong kind" of art is in this case not necessarily inferior -- indeed it is frequently acknowedged to be superior -- but rather is simply foreign.
For the cultural nationalist, a nation's culture is not an organic necessity, the product of its citizens' natural human urge to create: it is a thing forever threatened with extinction. imperilled not so much by the ignorance or indifference of the art-going public, but by their cosmopolitanism. The task of government is in this case not only to take from those who do not support the arts for the benefit of those who do, but also to ensure, by a range of protectionist measures, that those who do choose to support the arts direct their patronage to Canadian artists and their works, instead of their foreign rivals.
For the most part, the desirability of such protection is considered self-evident, at least to those in the mass media. But if we begin to investigate the rationale for state intervention in this regard, we are obliged at the least to ask what we hope to achieve by it. Is its purpose, in particular, artistic or political? As a matter of art, it is plainly nonsensical: whether Canadian artists make Canadian art for Canadian audiences, or whether Canadians choose to view foreign art, while their own artists venture abroad, is a point of supreme aesthetic indifference. Aesthetics is concerned with quality, not nationality.
No, the purpose is entirely, often avowedly, political. Cultural nationalism is not about culture; it is about nationalism. If Canadian artists, we are regularly instructed, produce works of Canadian art, and if (though this is less often mentioned) Canadians see the works of these Canadian artists -- if we "tell ourselves our own stories" -- this will create a shared national consciousness: in particular, it will or should serve to emphasize how different we are from other peoples, and (by inference, or at any rate by default) how much we have in common. Art will define the nation as a distinct cultural entity, and so justify the existence of the Canadian state: the same state, as it happens, that sponsored the art.
It is easy to see why politicians should find this bit of Philistinism so appealing. What is less clear is why so many artists should have been so eager to be co-opted. Two generations of Canadians have been told that the purpose of art is to create national feeling, and two generations of Canadian artists have gladly enlisted in this endeavour. As art, the results have been about as dire as one might predict. (While it has not been unknown for great art to further the agenda of its patrons in the past, the passion of Christ, I submit, offers a richer vein for propaganda than Canada's Unique Cultural Identity.) Yet even as a political strategy, it must be pronounced a failure: After sixty years of the CBC, forty years of the Canada Council, thirty years of Canadian content, we are more divided than ever.
There is something faintly ludicrous in the idea that art is all that stands between us and annexation. Even if we accept that nationhood is or should be rooted in difference, such cultural distinctions, if they are so great as to constitute, on their own, an argument for nationhood, are presumably not also so trivial as to fall away in the face of a few imported magazines. But suppose these differences were to disappear. Why precisely would this be objectionable? Foreign culture only represents a "threat" so far as it prevents Canadians from discovering their "real" culture. It is only inadequate as an expression of Canadian beliefs and values so long as it remains alien to them. But if these vital differences were to disappear, these objections would no longer hold. The very process of assimilation is its own defence.
That is, unless nationhood is an end in itself: Perhaps it is not that we want to be a nation because we're different, but that we want to be different in order to buttress our claims to nationhood. But if that is the case, if difference is merely a prop invoked to justify a claim to nationhood that in fact springs from other sources, then it is still less necessary to defend our "cultural sovereignty." Where before it was merely pointless -- the claim to nationhood would have disappeared along with our distinctiveness -- it is in this case entirely irrelevant: the nation does not depend upon cultural difference for its existence. Either it has some other, more substantial claim -- as I believe it does -- or it has none.
Or perhaps we merely wish to preserve our differences, just for the sake of being different. At some point, this is probably beyond argument: I don't see any virtue in difference as an end in itself, but perhaps others might. Regardless, it is still hard to see where the argument for cultural protectionism fits in all this. If foreign art, being foreign, cannot speak to us in the same way as domestic art, then the cultural choices of Canadians will presumably reflect these innate differences, without need of government steering. The only kind of art that would need protection -- protection, that is, from the choices of Canadians -- would be works that were so determinedly irredentist as to articulate a difference that did not exist.
Few, I think, are the cultural nationalists who would insist that the role of art is to invent cultural differences that aren't there. Rather, the argument has come to rely, almost exclusively, on an idea borrowed from the dismal science, economies of scale. Canadians are different, the argument runs, and would naturally choose works of art that spoke to those differences, in preference to the alien art that comes to us from south of the border. But they are not presented with such a choice, or not on equal terms, because of the immense scale economies available to producers of American art, by dint of their huge national market, who may thus undercut Canadian producers in their own. Students of economics will recognize this as the "infant industry" case for protection.
As a matter of economics, it is shaky enough: assuming the case for supporting one industry, at the cost of all other industries, were accepted, there are better ways than protection, notably direct subsidy. But even in cultural terms, it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions. Again: either we are different from the Americans in some fundamental way, or we are not. If we are, then price comparisons are irrelevant. Canadian culture and American culture are not, under this assumption, substitutes, interchangeable with each other, but wholly unrelated articles. One might as well complain that pencils were being underpriced by paperclips. If, on the other hand, we are not all that different, if Canadian and American artists are each as likely to have something to say to us as the other -- if, in short, artistic truth is universal -- then the same economies of scale are available to our artists as to theirs: for just as American producers would find willing buyers among Canadians, so would our cultural output find a ready market in the United States.
The arguments of the cultural nationalists would be hazy enough, even if anyone could define, in any meaningful way, what was "Canadian" and what was "foreign" art. Does the producer of a movie have to be Canadian? What about the director? The writer? The stars? The location? What if all of these were Canadian, but the movie was about a bunch of Americans? And what does it mean to say even that the director is Canadian? Is that on the basis of birthplace? Citizenship? Residence? There is no way of getting around this conundrum, which is why we have been treated in recent years to the periodic spectacle of various government bodies declaring, after much complex calculation, that Bryan Adams is not Canadian, but that Seagram's Inc. (based in New York) is.
So: we will protect what no one can define, for reasons no one can defend. A potted definition of cultural nationalism: the unreadable in pursuit of the ineffable.
* * *
Reply to Walter Pitman's letter:
I am grateful to Mr. Pitman for his lengthy reply. I only wish there were more in it that addressed itself to the argument I made.
To recap: I argued that it is a mistake to equate support for the arts with state support of the arts. If people want to support the arts they can; if they don't, there doesn't seem much point in forcing them to. There is, in particular, no evidence from history that the art that people paid for themselves was any worse than the art that was bought with other people's money.
Indeed, if anything we should expect to find the reverse. A work of art is not a thing, of which we can never have too much (I quote again Mr. Pitman's own aesthetic credo: "the more art there is, the better it is"). It is a relationship between the artist and his audience. That relationship, I argue, begins not with the finished product, but with the decision to create it, a decision that is inevitably tied up in how it is paid for (indeed, that is the whole case for subsidy). To the extent that it places itself between the artist and the audience, state support dulls the sense of obligation each ought to feel to the other, and to art.
The aesthetic experience is necessarily personal and individual; so, too, should be decisions about funding. That's an artistic argument, but it is also a statement about a civil society, and the grounds on which we are entitled to demand that others pay for our pleasures. The undoubted merits of a particular work of art, or of Art itself, are not sufficient in themselves to make the case for state support; if we want to take other people's money to pay for something, no matter how wonderful it may be, we are obliged to show why we cannot pay for it ourselves.
What, then, is the substance of Mr. Pitman's reply? I list his main arguments in order of their appearance: that the arts are good; that it's not that much money; that everybody else does it; that the arts are good; that people love the arts; that other things are subsidized; and of course, that the arts are good. How do any of these make the case for state support -- as opposed to support -- for the arts?
I am alive to art's potential use "as a way children develop confidence," its value as a means of expressing "despair and disappointment," not to say the "sheer joy and ecstasy of the moment" and the rest of art's many sublime delights. I am just not clear how any of this applies to people who do not come into contact with the arts, or ever wish to. If they do not have any direct experience of these pleasures, why should they have to pay the same as those who do? Mr. Pitman may believe it is enough to "enhance our togetherness as community" that "there are paintings to be viewed, performances to be given, films to be seen," but I cannot help thinking it is probably at least as important that those films actually are seen -- and that subsidy makes this less likely, not more.
We can argue, then, the precise amounts that should be defined as government's contribution to the production of art, but whether it's $3-billion a year or $1-billion or $1, it's money ill-spent -- and money that is unavailable to other causes, for which the case for subsidy is better established. It is not, in the same vein, an argument for subsidy that artists get so little of it if they should not be getting any of it -- especially as they seem so willing to work without it. But certainly the availability of subsidy has helped fuel the rapid expansion of those seeking work -- and funding -- as artists, and thus has necessarily left each having to make do with less.
Mr. Pitman's other arguments are equally baffling. That other countries subsidize the arts does not make it right. That other things are subsidized in Canada, on the other hand, may be either right or wrong. Where it is wrong, as in subsidies to nuclear power, it hardly makes subsidizing the arts any more right. Where it is right, as in public education, it is for reasons that are not present in respect of the arts. We do not, as Mr. Pitman fancies, pay for public education "because it is in our interest to have young people graduate with knowledge and skill." Our interest in those young graduates' skills is fully discharged by the salary that we pay them. We subsidize public education in order to ensure that children from poor families can go to school, and if we were wise we would subsidize the families rather than the schools. Possibly those children will study the arts at school, and so encounter art's civilizing mission. Wonderful. That is a far thing from forcing the average taxpayer to pick up half the tab for the carriage trade's nights at the opera.
Mr. Pitman seems incapable of distinguishing between a good whose benefits are largely restricted to those who consume it directly, and which can therefore be paid for privately, and those whose benefits are diffused over the community at large, and therefore can only be paid for collectively. If he likes a thing, it is simply deemed to be of benefit to the community. About the only place he succeeds in conjuring a collective benefit from the arts, a benefit enjoyed just as much by those who do not attend the arts as by those who do, is in the matter of national pride. This is indeed an argument for state involvement in archiving extant works: the National Gallery, for example. A collection of the finest art that a society has produced may well be the object of national pride; as such it may be something people would be willing to pay for, whether or not they actually visited the place.
This is to be distinguished from the usual business of subsidy, which is directed to supporting artistic creation. The celebration of works on which there is already a high degree of consensus is more likely to generate a collective benefit, or "positive externality," than the commissioning of new works on which tastes may differ violently. By the same token, the culture that arises from the accretion of individual judgments and individual sacrifices seems more likely to inspire genuine national pride than the subsidized offspring of closeted peer juries.
But to repeat: The problem of subsidy is independent of the quality of the work. I do have concerns about the kind of art produced in a cultural milieu that is so firmly rooted in contempt for the audience. But even if state support produced nothing but Shakespeare and Moliere, there are larger questions afoot than just: what does it mean for art? We must also ask: what does it mean for society? On what grounds, in a liberal democracy, are we justified in reaching into our neighbour's pocket?
It is not enough to argue the means by reference only to the ends. The palace of Versailles is a magnificent artistic achievement. It probably could not have been done in a democracy. It does not make the case for absolute monarchy.