Commerce and Culture

[ErikinWest]

How dare you retract things!! Get those gloves back on and get back in the ring!!

I'd prefer to keep my body free of bruises and wounds.

But seriously, and entirely off-topic, I just noticed that you're practically a neighbor. Just a short, six-hour train ride to the north. And in the same town as Barry Truax. Do you know any of the folks at Simon Fraser?

Actually I'm still in high school! And I'd probably go to UBC or maybe a foreign university (assuming I get a scholarship, as I am too poor at the moment).

Erik

[rojo]

A scholarship you say? Haven't you a wealthy patron? I hope your scholarship is not from the government...

If you can't find a political party that supports your views, perhaps you could voice them to your local elected officials? I find it surprising that there are no groups that hold these same opinions.

In any case, you raise interesting issues. It will be interesting to see what happens with music in the future; I get the feeling that the web could change a lot of things regarding the dissemination of art and music. Perhaps some day classical music etc. will be able to thrive in a commercial environment on it's own, and government subsidies for the arts will become obsolete; who knows...

[Ouled Nails]

I am extremely impressed by your debating skills, Erikinwest. To tell you the truth, I imagined that your posts were written by an economist or a grad. student in economy whose training led to a vastly different perception of music and music composition. Well, young man, (Erik, right?), best of luck with your college education. Write that essay when you apply to a university, don't be shy, and knock their socks off. I bet that, notwithstanding what appears to be a financial Mount Everest at this point in time, you'll see doors opening in front of you.
sincerely

[Sybarite]

... Actually I do enjoy many of the BBC's programs. I also enjoy the CBC.

So you enjoy subsidised television ...

I also believe that food is very valuable, however, I don't think the government should be producing and distributing it (or even subsidizing or protecting it for that matter). And yes of course I'd like music to be accessible. But I believe that a free market with consumer driven demand and patronage could achieve that...

Can we assume, therefore, that you also think that the "free market" (only really "free" for those who have money) works well in education and health, for instance? Should we ignore talent and potential, and medical need, if people don't have the amount of money required to pay for it?

I'm slightly startled with the words subsidies and poor. Tell me Sybarite, who are the key beneficiaries of these art subsidies? Since I guess you watch British television, I'm sure you watched the Yes Prime Minister episode with the art funds for the royal opera house. Is it the poor citizens of London's East End who enjoy Wagner, Puccini, and Wilde? Do the symphony and theatre subsidies go to low income classes or do they go to upper middle income civil servants and businessmen?

There are theatres in other parts of London – and England and the UK. There are local theatres – local rep companies in areas such as Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham, companies producing work around local communities and for those same local communities. At least there were. There were also theatre in education (TIE) groups taking theatre to schools. There were orchestras that put on special performances at cut rates for school groups. And I return to the BBC – the BBC is subsidised by a legally-enforced licence fee that anyone who has a TV set must buy. And everyone who has a TV benefits directly or indirectly, or has the chance to benefit. There is a very good argument that – which I am not going to bore you with here – that recent pushes for the BBC to commercialise have had a serious and negative effect of dumbing down programming in general and ghettoising programming that requires the viewer to use their brain.

And again, I retreat to history. Since English theatre was brought up, let's talk about Shakespeare. Here was a man whose theatres were located with the bars and brothels. A man whose society thought of his artistic talents as rubbish. If there had of been government hand outs during the 17th century, do you think Shakespeare would have received a penny?

I don't know. And neither do you. We can't know either whether a greater talent than Shakespeare was missed because there was no support available. To suppose so would be pure speculation. It's also a pointless exercise to consider the past in light of today's attitudes. I would suggest, however, that there isn't really so much difference between the concept of patronage by an individual or the state as you would like to believe.

Incidentally, Shakspeare was not considered rubbish, but he wasn't the court favourite (that was Johnson, who still did two weeks in the Tower for a two-line joke in Westwood Ho about James I's accent).

Well, certainly correlations are not causations. And why haven't there been more Bachs or Mozarts?

You might as well ask why we haven't seen more Picassos and more Van Gogh's, more Bergmans and more Trauffauts. You want unique art or do you want copies?

... This idea that government must protect artists from profit is like saying: "the public is not smart enough to know what ought to be art". And what's democratic about that?

What "idea"? Who has suggested that anyone needs "protecting" from anything? Nor has anyone suggested that profit is evil per se. Nobody has said these things, Erik. Although you may wish to consider philosophically just what levels of profit are reasonable – given that the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of a very tiny minority of the population. Perhaps you'd care to consider the ethics of that?