The survival of art

For a while now, I've felt that government funding for the arts is not necessarily a good thing. It creates an unhealthy dependency upon the State on the part of the arts community, which, as the provider of a valuable de-stabilizing political force and critical tool, needs to keep its distance. Furthermore, it means that government is doing the job that society should be doing, which itself is unhealthy.

Now, of course, this makes me sound rather cold, and for that I apologise. I guess I'm the Heartless part of this blog's equation for today. And I suppose that the argument could be made that the survival of art is all that matters, that the method of that survival is irrelevant, and that since the government has access to the largest amount of resources, it should be providing the largest amount of arts funding. I disagree with this argument, as I don't think that mere survival is worth the price that art pays. But, nonetheless, the survival argument, and its variants, lead to stories like this one, from The Hook:

In a move sure to startle the British Columbia book and magazine industries, the Campbell government has slashed their support.
As reported on Thursday by CBC News and the Globe and Mail, the Arts and Culture Branch of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts has cut funding from the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, and BC BookWorld, a monthly newspaper about books published here.
According to the Globe and Mail, the ministry phoned the organizations on Tuesday:

“It's devastating,” says Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the ABPBC. Her organization has lost $45,000 in funding – out of a yearly $290,000 budget.
“It's a massive amount,” she says. “It's also demoralizing. You think you're in a sophisticated society and you find out that this is not actually the case, so it's very distressing.”

The ministry's own website on Thursday night had no mention of this, or any other event more recent than September 21.

Read it here. What's telling to me is Margeret Reynolds' reaction to the news; her assumption that it is a mark of a society's sophistication that such funding exists.

I would suggest that it's a mark of a society's lack of sophistication when such funding is deemed necessary.