I'm not a big fan of Norman Lebrecht whose Slipped Disc site, while often the source of the latest news, tends to resemble a tabloid. But he has an excellent article in The Spectator about just what goes on with the Arts Council of England. It is a case study of the myriad problems with state funding of the arts. Let me pick out a few good examples:
In the past 20 years, the Arts Council has shed most of its ethos. The rot began in 1997 when the incoming Blair regime demanded social reform in exchange for state cash. Arts organisations were ordered to expand education. Subsidy was pegged to compliance. Orchestras had to demonstrate that they and their audiences matched the national demographic in gender, race and sexual orientation. Proof was demanded in triplicate. A request for state funding grew from one sheet of paper to a fat sheaf of boxes, all of which have to be ticked. Managers tell me it can now take three days to complete a repeat application for musical subsidy.
Politics polluted the process. Under Blair, dosh was pumped into Labour’s north-east heartland and drained from the south-west. Gerry Robinson, a Labour donor who had trashed ITV’s best drama department, was made ACE chairman. The Keynesian imperative of nurturing art at grass roots gave way to corporate speak. Expert panels that once doled out grants after case-by-case debate were dissolved. John Major’s Lottery bonanza, intended for arts and sports, was divvied up by Blairites to education, environment, health, heritage and charities.
The latest trend is to give over funding decisions to a computer:
Nowadays, ACE officials are trained in nothing more useful than ensuring all boxes are ticked, all regions represented. After that everyone, good or worse, will have prizes.
Theirs is a job you might think could be done by computer — and that’s exactly what’s about to happen. Some weeks ago, the ACE issued a £2.7 million invitation to tender for ‘a monitoring system that will measure the artistic quality of the work of its National Portfolio Organisations’.
It is the ACE’s largest-ever commission and it has already consumed more than £700,000 in planning the criteria that are being fed into the computer. Some of these ‘core quality metrics’ are infantile beyond belief. They include ‘Challenge: it was thought-provoking’ and ‘Captivation: it was absorbing and held my attention’. Originality is defined as ‘it was ground-breaking’.
This, give me strength, is how decisions are made in 2017, how the arts are funded. Mortal intelligence has been rendered redundant. Computer says yes or no.
What would bar the door against this sort of thing is a real understanding of aesthetic judgement, but that has long been exiled to a far country. Political decision-making and the arts are very uncomfortable bedfellows.
The two-edged sword of the title? On the one hand, large-scale classical music organizations and performances are not and have never been commercially self-supporting. Opera and symphony have always been seriously expensive activities and the only way they could support themselves would be if tickets were a thousand dollars a seat or more. This is rightly seen as being socially undesirable, so they are subsidized by the state so that ticket prices can be within reach of most people. This is a good thing, I think. But the temptation is always for government policy to turn arts subsidies into social engineering and that always has unfortunate consequences as Norman Lebrecht chronicles above.
Here are highlights from the English National Opera's production of Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach. Interesting that, on YouTube, every single clip from the ENO is either a brief commercial for a production or, like this one, an audio only clip without visuals. For a non-commercial entity, they guard their output as zealously as any corporate entity.
As an only marginally socialized young person, much of the world of art and culture puzzled the heck out of me, growing up. A lot of this was an incapacity to realize that simple evil and nastiness was present even in the most prestigious arts institutions. As Solzhenitsyn said:
"the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"
But this truth was one omitted from most of the books I read about the arts which concerned themselves with uncontroversial topics like the technical progress of the arts, or the history of the arts (which they took to be the same thing) or personalities in the arts or, in music, style and repertoire. All very useful things to know, but only part of the story and the most flattering part at that. The more interesting story is perhaps how truly creative artists are often frustrated or ignored by the "arts community" which is, sadly, to a great part comprised of self-serving, narcissistic, careerist mediocrities who spend all their time puffing up their own meagre accomplishments.
Canada, with its naive devotion to dangerous abstractions like "arts policy", which is really nothing more than the arts establishment's attempt to control arts expression to further its own political aims, is a particularly supportive environment for arts careerism as it is for elite oligarchies. We find both these unpleasant characteristics in the sordid tale of "The heiress, the impresario and the juiciest divorce ever" in Maclean's Magazine. Here is an excerpt, but you really need to read the whole thing:
On April 28, 2014, a joyful Eleanor McCain shared her love for Jeff Melanson on Facebook, posting a photo of the two of them sitting next to one another on a stone bench. The daughter of the late frozen french-fry titan Wallace McCain, who has carved out a career as a singer, is wearing a pink dress and vintage jacket while smiling adoringly at the man she called her “fiancé.” He’s attired in a dark blue suit, looking away from her, into the distance, a beatific smile on his face. The accompanying message—a hybrid love-letter/PR statement—pays tribute to Melanson, citing his 2½ years running the Banff Centre and his recently announced position as president and CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra: “I am very proud of Jeff for his recent appointments, all of his accomplishments and most of all the integrity, character and grace with which he handles everything in his life. Congratulations my love!” she wrote, attaching links to media stories celebrating Melanson’s return: The TSO “needs a miracle worker and it has found one,” the Toronto Star gushed in one.
But the combatants also represent the extremes of the insular Canadian art world—buyer and seller, donor and visionary—and at least some of what’s wrong with it. If McCain bought her way into the arts scene, “[losing] money on her ‘artistic’ endeavours,” as her estranged husband alleges in his claim that she “buys opportunities for herself and loses money on her ‘artistic’ endeavours’,” Melanson sold his way in: catapulting to celebrity status, particularly among the philanthropic elite, with a compelling, marketable vision of how the arts enrich communities, nations and economies. Such was Melanson’s charisma and celebrity that this is a world in which the hare, not the tortoise, gets the spotlight even if he doesn’t finish the race. It’s seldom acknowledged that his near-$1-billion plan for the Banff Centre was abandoned 2½ years in, and his epic $166.4-million plan for the money-losing TSO to build a recording studio and media lab went unquestioned publicly.
Let's just have a listen to the artistic side of Eleanor McCain. I choose this excerpt only because I performed the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo on this same stage with the same orchestra--and they weren't nearly as bored as they appear here:
What about Jeff Melanson, her ex? He is the other side of the Canadian arts scene, not the trust fund amateur, but the snake-oil salesman. Here are some excerpts from a fawning puff-piece in the Globe and Mail:
The term rock-star arts administrator is not used with great regularity – even less so with “Canadian” tacked on in front of it – but this is a story about one. Jeff Melanson shocked the Canadian arts establishment last month when he announced that he was leaving the Banff Centre, the renowned creativity incubator and performance hub, where he has been president since 2012. Two weeks later, another announcement: He would be, come the fall, president and CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Melanson has been Canada's leading arts administrator, at least in music, with stints at the Royal Conservatory of Music Community School in Toronto, the National Ballet School, arts advisor to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the Banff Centre and finally the Toronto Symphony. These are the leading performing arts institutions in English Canada. Maclean's mentions some of his accomplishments:
Melanson checked all the boxes, appealing to a younger audience in a way older donors could appreciate. At Banff, to the consternation of some, he shifted focus from classical music to jazz, world music and indie bands. Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew was given a residency; Melanson sang backup on a recording project. He reached out to First Nations, staging a Banff first: an all-night ceremony that saw elders bless the campus. It was a pattern repeated at the TSO; partnerships included one with the Polaris Music Prize that saw the orchestra cover Drake’s Know Yourself and DJ Skratch Bastid headline a show.
After he left Banff to take up the position at the Toronto Symphony:
At Banff, where the expansion plan has been downsized and the digital radio station shuttered, there’s a sense of embarrassment. “After the shock, I think the general feeling was one of being used. It was more a sense of shame that they had been duped into submission by this fast-talking guy and then abandoned,” says one insider. “Eleanor McCain is not the only one jilted here,” said another. At the TSO, the Studio Project is “on the back burner,” says a spokesman.
This is the sad tale of arts in Canada: it is dominated by an incestuous ring of insiders who merely use the arts for their own career ambitions. They are mediocrities and worse: scam artists and slick talkers. People with no understanding or interest in actual aesthetic value, but only what public and patron funds they can cream off for themselves. It is a dark and depressing tale, but one that the public has little sense of because the media keep shining, forgive me, the shit and blowing pixie dust over everything.
Of course there are real artists in Canada. But they get little credit and are hugely overshadowed by people like this. After a while, they either move away or give up in discouragement because it is the mediocrities and scam artists that set the standards and make the important decisions.
Let's see if we can clear the palate with some good music. This is young Canadian guitarist Drew Henderson, whom I just discovered recently. He is playing the Zapateado from the Three Spanish Pieces by Joaquin Rodrigo:
I have lived away from Canada for quite a while now, but I still am surprised sometimes at where Canada is going. It is an odd experience being an expatriate. What prompts this is an article in today's Globe and Mail about Canadian culture as a public good. Here is an excerpt, just for flavor:
The policy tools that have protected and nurtured Canada’s cultural industries since the 1970s are unknown to transnational distributors of foreign content – that would be Google, YouTube and Netflix – while Canadian consumers are increasingly sidestepping the domestic distributors who, whether by inclination or by regulation, produce Canadian content.
Anything bother you about that? Canada is, of course, strongly influenced by being America's hat, as it were. A thinly-populated nation of a very similar ethnic and cultural background smack dab up against the most powerful nation in the world has to feel a bit defensive about its identity and culture. Canada is a cobbled-together entity, made up of those scraps of the British Empire left over after the American Revolution. A wonderful place, despite all that, but one that has always been rather unsure of who it was, exactly. Not American (shudder), not British (shudder twice), but without the rough-and-ready individuality of, say, Australia.
So, back in the 70s, it was decided that Canada's "cultural industries", meaning Canadian television, movie-makers and music producers mostly, had to be protected from US competition lest all we have to watch turns out to be re-runs of Law and Order. No! A stand must be taken, at taxpayer expense, to defend uh, great Canadian television shows like, uh, help me out here? Perhaps the Canadian movie industry which, apart from some Quebec movies seems to be largely American products shot in Vancouver like the X-Files and Battlestar Galactica? No? Great Canadian musicians like Bruce Cockburn, Alanis Morissette and Leonard Cohen? Well, frankly, I doubt they need money from the Canadian taxpayer any more than Celine Dion does.
So what I think we are actually talking about is subsidies to the cultural industries, not the artists, but the middlemen, happily standing in line for their handouts from the public trough. And this is supposed to be a public good? Could someone slap me please?
The article, by Kate Taylor, describes the nuts and bolts of what she calls a crisis:
Netflix is taking an estimated $445-million a year in subscription fees out of Canada; YouTube is taking an estimated $22.5-million in annual advertising revenue out of Canada; iTunes and Google Play are taking $50-million in annual music sales out of Canada. And half of the estimated $432-million in ad revenues that the newspaper and magazine industries are losing every year to digital platforms is also leaving Canada.
What this means, simply, is that individuals in Canada are purchasing those cultural artifacts that they choose to and that the Internet has made available to them. If they prefer to subscribe to HBO so they can watch Game of Thrones instead of a second rate cop show set in Vancouver (itself an imitation of a US model) then this poses a terrible problem for Canadian Culture, which must be controlled, manipulated and force-fed to the populace by the Powers That Be, meaning cultural czars in Toronto. What is being left out of this accounting is those dollars, big American dollars, that are being spent by Americans to purchase Canadian cultural products. Not much in the way of television or movies, mind you, but quite a substantial amount of Canadian music. Leonard Cohen fills big halls the world over so all that revenue should be counted as accruing to Canada. Celine Dion has sold 200 million records that need to be added in.
So, in reality, there is no crisis whatsoever, except in the pocketbooks of those cultural middlemen that have gotten used to living off the fat of the taxpayer while delivering nothing but bland, forgettable cultural "products" that Canadians have had forced on them. This is a particularly revealing excerpt from the article:
What’s to be done? There are practical steps that could be taken – you could ask Internet service providers to start contributing to the Canada Media Fund just as cable and satellite providers do – but since there is often public hostility to and misunderstanding of such measures, it might be a good idea to lay a bit of philosophical groundwork first. Why can’t we just leave Canadian producers to compete in an international marketplace? Why do we need Canadian content in the first place?
Ah yes, that public hostility that needs to be managed! Let's have a look at that "philosophical groundwork." There is not much there, but this comes the closest:
...in a world where narratives and images are as powerful as money and guns, a successful society does not import every single cultural good that it consumes; that a creative society is one that creates things.
Let me be the devil's advocate for a minute here and say that narratives and images are NOT as powerful as money and guns. The Second World War was not won by the side with the coolest narrative and niftiest images--the Nazis obviously had the grooviest uniforms--but by the side with the most B24 bombers and aircraft carriers. Sure, a creative society is one that creates things, which is just the tautology that a creative society is creative. Sadly, Canada, apart from pop music, isn't very creative. To be quite honest, you have never heard of any Canadian television shows because they are feeble and boring imitations of American television shows, only existing because they are propped up with taxpayer subsidies. You have likely never seen a Canadian movie for the same reason (as opposed to an American movie shot in Canada). You have heard of quite a few Canadian pop musicians because they are creative and popular enough to sell around the world. They don't need any subsidies. And if Canadian television and movies were any good, neither would they.
The bottom line is that, basking in the prosperity of unearned public subsidies, the Canadian cultural industries have been cranking out crap for decades.
Any culture in Canada that is truly a public good will be sought out and purchased by the public because they see it as good. It is a simple enough concept. But that is an unacceptable answer to the Canadian Powers That Be because it offers, in the immortal words of blogger Glenn Reynolds, "insufficient opportunities for graft." Taxing citizens to give subsidies to people to produce television shows and movies that they do not want to watch is nothing more than graft.
Now I know you are asking yourself, "could Canadian television really be as bad as he says?" I offer in evidence an episode from a show deemed one of the Top 10 Canadian TV Shows: Mantracker:
After that we really need some Canadian music to clear the palate. Here is my favorite Canadian popular musician, Leonard Cohen:
It is pretty clear to me that the more you support and nurture the pseudo-creativity of "cultural industries" the more you ignore, if not actually discourage, real creativity. Case in point: Canada.
UPDATE: This has sparked a bit of discussion in the comments, so let me add a parting thought. What is deeply troubling to me about the Canadian approach to culture and the arts is that all of the agency is given to government. The "policy tools that have protected and nurtured Canada’s cultural industries since the 1970s" are all activities of government. Government has a very iffy history in this area, usually declining rather quickly into propaganda rather than culture. Analyzing how this works in Canada would be best discussed in another post (after a lot of research). One thing I am pretty sure of is that creativity in the arts and culture always, ALWAYS, comes from the individual mind. It is not something that can be protected and nurtured by government policy. Governments can offer patronage and some of this can be good. Support for orchestras and opera probably depends on this. But if we look at history we see that most patronage comes from a few influential individuals: French aristocrats, Russian noblemen, wealthy Viennese. Sometimes the Church or a municipality like Venice or Florence. But in those cases as well, I suspect that a few influential individuals were behind it.
If you want to support the arts, it is very simple: commission artists and composers and arrange for the works to be disseminated. How do you choose who to pick? Ah, that would depend on aesthetics!
