“It will be that much harder for Ottawa to cut arts programs for young artists while endowing the Canada Prizes. Artists should be thrilled. This is their moment.”
“It will be that much harder for Ottawa to cut arts programs for young artists while endowing the Canada Prizes. Artists should be thrilled. This is their moment.”
— The Globe, today.
Fun questions: Harder why? Harder how? I think it will be easier to cut arts programs for young artists while endowing the Canada Prizes. I believe that arts programs for young artists and the Canada Prize endowment are, at best, independent variables — that governments can raise or lower one without particular regard to the level of the other. As Junius might have put it, if we could just get him to stop spinning in his grave, these are some arbitrary measures, bro. Are we just typing pretty-sounding sentences over at the Globe ed board these days?
UPDATE: The second envelope has arrived, and we can now give out this year’s Canada Prize for the Smartest Insight in an Arts Column that Still Seems to Have Escaped the Government’s Notice.
“Of course, the answer, as demonstrated by multiple statements from Conservative Party members, was that they simply didn’t like the art being funding by those touring programs. I don’t know what makes them think that the international artists they want to bring to Toronto, who will be surely selected by an arm’s-length committee of arts experts, will be any less weird than our own stars.”
— Russell Smith, in the Globe, today.