Earlier today, Jesse Brown (this week’s guest blogger on Boing Boing and host of the TVO podcast Search Engine) posted the first of his blogs: All publicly funded content should be in the public domain. In the article he says:

In Canada, movies are supported by Telefilm, TV by the Canadian Television Fund, books and art by The Canada Council for the Arts, and so on. But most of this stuff isn’t distributed very well or for very long, and you can only get your hands on a fraction of it.

So I want to put forth one more contrarian position: I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.  The truth, in fact, is that I am of two minds on the subject.

First and foremost, as a consumer of copyrighted materials (ie: reading books, watching tv shows, watching movies, listening to music), I am a firm believer that our copyright system needs a major overhaul, with looser copyright restrictions, and a thriving Public Domain (which we don’t have; when was the last time a copyrighted work fell into the Public Domain?).

To state that all government funded content should be in the public domain is a pretty bold statement, however.  All publicly funded content?  I don’t know about in other countries, but in Canada, that’s a pretty broad cross section.  Because there aren’t many aspects of the arts (which creates the content) that aren’t publicly funded.  Almost every TV show, movie,  and play are funded with government money.  Novels are written, magazines are published, music is composed.  There is not one aspect of the arts that government funding does not touch.  Does that mean that all this “content” should be in the public domain?

Maybe.  How many TV and Radio shows created by CBC have been relegated to the vaults, never to be seen again?  Why not put these shows out into the public domain so that everyone can enjoy them? How many plays are written, given a few weeks to run in a theatre, and then never seen again?  Why not make publicly funded work available in the public domain after 5 years (or maybe even, in the case of television, 5 years after the show goes off the air).

What do you think?

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Sometimes I read the Toronto Sun.  Not because I like the paper, but because I really hate it.  I think its important to know what the “other side” is saying, and to understand that there are people who actually believe what that newspaper prints.  Case in point: this article from the online version of the paper, which references an article in yesterday’s print edition.  The article outlines a complaint from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation complaining about going to the Summerworks Festival, specifically due to funds going to a play called “Homegrown”.

Homegrown is a play about one of the members of the Toronto 18, calling the play sympathetic to terrorists.  The article uses this play as a springboard for the Sun’s familiar complaint about funding for the arts, and how the funding plays is destroying the fabric of our society – ok, this article doesn’t say specifically that, but its clear that the Sun is revving up their readers to be outraged about this “abuse of public funds”.  Some choice quotes from the article:

The [Summerworks] festival receives more than $90,000 from all three levels of government including $35,000 from Heritage Canada. Homegrown received $6,000 from the city funded Toronto Arts Council for a workshop.  The play’s writer, Catherine Frid, stressed Friday that the play isn’t condoning terrorism but is a “sympathetic portrait” of one of the men caught up in the terror bust.

[snip]

But Kevin Gaudet, of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said tax dollars shouldn’t be going towards a “terrorist love-in”. “You want to put on a play? Fine. Hang up your shingle and ask people to pay for it … and if it has to do with sympathetic portraits of terrorists who want to destroy my country, I won’t go,” Gaudet said.

It is of course, important to note that the CTF:

objects to funding for all festivals from Pride Toronto to the Calgary Stampede, he said.“We advocate against all this type of funding in that context,” Gaudet said.

CTF is a conservative group that objects to most public funding of events. Of course, without the kind of funding they object to, there would be no Fringe Festival, no jazz festival, no TIFF, no Stratford or Shaw festivals, or really any cultural events whatsoever.  The play that CTF is “objecting to” is an excuse for the old saw about the bugaboo of the evils of public funding for the arts.

Arts funding organizations from all levels of government need to fund shows based on their merit or their relevance, rather than on their political ramifications.  This means that sometimes there will be controversial plays that are funded by the government.  But this is not a bad thing.  The arts should challenge political correctness, they should be controversial, they should spark debate.  If nothing controversial can ever receive funding because the sensitive right-wingers at the CTF (which will always be offended because public funds are involved) or the Sun might be offended, then all funded art will be safe and boring.

The article itself may be familiar territory for the Sun, the most important part of the article are the online comments.  Many of the comments are from people who are just as outraged as the Sun (and the CTF) wanted them to be.  These are the people who believe that the arts are not worth funding.  These are the people who think that artists are swimming in money, people who think like Stephen Harper does when he talked about funding cuts back in the last Federal election (“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,”*).  In my mind, the comments say the most.  These are the people and attitudes that artists are up “against” when election time comes, when people want to be outraged about “wasted government spending”, and how the arts are for the rich and not for “regular people” so why should we fund them?  I’d consider the comments a “must read”, at the very least, to know what those people who disagree with arts funding believe, so that those of us who recognize the importance of funding can plan our response.

*Quoted from the Toronto Star, Sept. 24, 2008

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Yesterday, Howard Sherman, the director of the American Theatre Wing posted a blog entitled This is not a Political Blog.  In this blog post, he opens a discussion about why governments find it so easy to cut arts funding programs, like the National Endowment for the Arts in the US, or the various arts programs that have been cut (or threatened with cuts) in Canada (for example see the situation in BC).

The heart of the discussion starts with this statement:

The reason the NEA (and the NEH and NPR and PBS) make for such easy targets is that their audiences and their artists fail to make a case for their intrinsic value.

He has an excellent point.  Those of us who are involved in the arts and for whom the arts matter to a great deal can talk about how important the arts are, but mostly we’re preaching to the choir.  How do we make this something that people who aren’t involved in the arts believe in?  In the blog post, Mr. Sherman talks about how, from time to time, there have been talks about creating a “Got milk” advertising campaign for the arts.  After all, pork, cotton and milk still have to remind people of their importance, why not the arts?

But is an advertising campaign really the way to go about it?  I’m not so sure.  How would an advertising campaign be paid for?  If the people behind the campaign used even a few cents of public money, you know for a fact that this would be jumped on by the folks at The Sun, and likely decried by the conservative leaders (See Stephen Harper’s “Average Canadians” comments from a few years ago).  So, what to do?

The part of the blog post that really got me thinking was this:

A big part of the problem is that those of us who are profoundly dedicated to the arts hold them as a sacred belief; we are called to them as surely as religious leaders are called to the cloth. Yet to pursue the comparison, religious leaders spend one day every week making the case for the relevancy and value of their religion (these are called sermons), while we spend our time selling tickets to individual productions or exhibits.

He’s absolutely right.  We don’t spend a lot of time making the case for the relevancy or value of our craft.  Rather, we do a lot of shilling for people to buy show tickets.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be trying to sell our shows.  Rather, why aren’t we spending more time encouraging people to go to other people’s shows as well?  And not just within the same disciplines.  Theatre people should be promoting dancers, art gallery shows, etc.  How else can we raise awareness of the arts that are occurring all around us.

People who are passionate about the arts “get” that they are important.  People who don’t really care about the arts (and thus don’t go to see shows, galleries, etc), don’t see why they are important.  For them, the arts are something for the “elite” or the rich.  Something that’s not for them.  And I think that in a way, we feed this belief by doing little more than promoting our own stuff.  If we’re not acting as boosters for the arts in general then how can someone who thinks of the arts as a waste of public money think of us as anything other than (as our Prime Minister put it) whiners complaining about our cushy, subsidized lifestyles [paraphrased].

I think we all need to do more to talk up other shows, other artists, other disciplines.  We all need to work harder to raise general awareness of the arts, bridge the gap between those who care about the arts, and those who don’t yet care about the arts.

To that end, if you have something you want me to promote, let me know about it.  I’ll promote the heck out of it, be it theatre, dance, a gallery show, whatever.  All I ask, is that you do the same.  Promote a show that’s not yours.  Promote something outside of your discipline.  Boost the arts in general, rather than just the thing you are directly involved with.

How else can we “make the case for the case for the relevancy and value of our art”?

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At the beginning of the year, I talked about wanting to put together a “creative support group“.  I said:

I’d like to propose a regular get-together of creative people.  Coffee (or beer for those who drink it) at some place where we can sit and talk about theatre, or writing (or whatever) in the hopes that I can keep the creative juices flowing (and hopefully so can the other folks participating).

A few people contacted me, so we made a Facebook group, and we’ve had a couple of meetings.  Basically, its people who have a creative leaning getting together and talking about the things that they are working on, general encouragement, and just socializing with people who create.

Last night, we happened to be discussing yesterday’s post, and we started talking about the disparate arts disciplines.  The people who met yesterday were predominantly of theatrical disciplines and we were discussing how there is a distinct lack of “community”.  We talked about how the theatre “community” exists on something of an existential level: theatre folks tend to meet up while working on a project, and then go their separate ways.  One of the folks called the “theatre community” more of an underground brother (or sister)-hood.  If you extend the community discussion to include other disciplines, things get more muddy.  How many of us network with dancers, or painters or sculptors, etc?  Very few of us, we found.

Why don’t we socialize with artists from other disciplines?  And if we don’t, how can we possibly become the kind of “boosters” of the arts in general, that I talked about yesterday?

When I first started organizing the “support group for creative people”, I envisioned it as something that encompassed artists of many disciplines.  Due to the network of people I have friended on Facebook, most of those who have joined in the group have been theatre people.  But I’d love to have dancers, other performers, and artists from non-performing disciplines join us.

I have found the regular get-togethers of this “support group” to be creatively invigorating.  I’d encourage you to form your own: gather together artists of all stripes, and talk about what you’re working on, encourage each other, learn about the arts that you don’t “get”, and keep yourself inspired through interacting with other creative people.

And maybe, if we all do something like this, we’ll start building the kind of unified community that can better become the kind of arts boosters we need to be in order to help bring more audiences to art in general, so that we can all

“make the case for the case for the relevancy and value of our art”?

Posted in Community, Culture, The Biz, Theatre | 1 Comment »