Angry in the Great White North

Though conservatives in this country are celebrating the win on January 23, we still have a long way to go to reach the happy state of affairs in the US:

The Democrats better get it together. Even Hollywood's most ardent Bush-bashers think the party can't marshal its forces. Alec Baldwin is appalled that Sen. Ted Kennedy and other liberals could muster only 25 of the 41 votes needed for a filibuster to block Samuel Alito's Supreme Court confirmation.

The problem, he told us at Tuesday's meeting of the Oxonian Society, is the number of "chicken-bleep Democrats in the Senate. We have a bunch of budding Zell Millers down there," referring to the crusty Georgia senator who backed the Republican agenda in 2004. Although that was almost two years ago, Baldwin says, "I loathe and despise him on a daily basis."

Meanwhile, Meryl Streep needs a dose of Prozac. "I'm so demoralized," she told us at the Broadway opening of Sarah Jones' brilliant "Bridge and Tunnel."

Demoralized artists gnashing their teeth about how little influence they have on people and on politics except their single vote at election time, but hey, even we little people have that much influence. What's the point of being a "star" if you don't matter more than the shlubs cleaning out your indoor pool in your California mansion?

In Canada, we haven't reach the point where artists realize to their horror that they aren't all that special.

Indeed, Margaret Atwood, the epitome of the Canadian artiste, an author who enjoys her status as a big fish in a small pond, firmly believes the rules are different for artists. In a way, she is right, though she doesn't get it.

As it is, she understands art to be a gift, from her to us, and not subject to the rules of the free market, as she explains in this book review of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde, in which she also discusses Hyde's "syncretic masterpiece" The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.

Ironically, though she doesn't see it (of course), she's on exactly the right track. I'm certain that if she actually understood what she was saying, she'd take it all back:

By the pressures of the market economy we live in, [author Lewis Hyde] says, we've been fooled into believing that there is only one way in which things are exchanged: through money transactions, or buying and selling. Yet on some level we know there's another economy at work in human societies: the gift economy, which has quite different rules and consequences.

Money transactions create no bonds of love or gratitude, and imply no obligations. Gifts, on the other hand, are reciprocal, and also emotionally loaded: market exchanges move through the bank account, gifts through the heart. Where the gift circulates, spiritual life flourishes. All societies exist in both economies, says Hyde, but each tends to value one economy over the other. Our own society has overemphasized the market and denied the gift, and the result is stagnant wealth on the one hand and spiritual death and material poverty on the other.

The artist belongs primarily to the gift economy; without that element of creation which arrives uncommanded and cannot be bought, the work is unlikely to be alive.

The Gift should also be read by every patron, every legislator, and every die-hard opponent of arts funding. It lights up the dark corners.

Of course, Margaret Atwood has it utterly wrong. Put aside her blather about "spiritual death" (since when did art become a religion?), and consider this idea of two economies. This so-called "gift economy" does not exist. State funding of the arts is not a gift. It is compulsory, with taxes taken on pain of criminal and civil penalty from the people doing the "money transactions" and handed over by bureaucrats to artists, not out of love for art, but on diktat from political masters who do not actually evaluate the art to be gifted, but are only interested that a certain amount of money be spent in order to curry favour and votes.

Of course, it is that special attention artists get from government that is so addictive, that Canadian artists enjoy, and that Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep seem to miss so much.

However, for all the money the government "gifted" to artists, there is no bond of love formed with any taxpayer in this country. Not one single taxpayer looks at the huge tax bite in his paycheque and feels gratitude that artists will be subsidized.

A gift has to come from the individual, and has to be a free choice. If Margaret Atwood truly wants a "gift economy" to flourish, she should be at the front of the crowd demanding the immediate removal of government funding of the arts (or at least a dramatic reduction), and a change to the tax code in line with what exists in the US, a full tax deduction for private funding of the arts (and not the limited and paltry tax credit that exists in Canada). That way taxpayers can make a conscious choice to shift some of their income out of the market economy and into the gift economy, to use her terms. Of course, they would be compelled to select the recipient worthy of their gift, and in doing so the bond of love and gratitude she talks about is formed.

Maybe she's terrified that not too many people would find her gift worthy, and the love and gratitude won't pay the mortgage. I suspect a lot of artists in Canada would find a significant lack of love and gratitude for their work, as per this from the February 15, 2000 edition of the Ottawa Citizen:

A list of the grants shows the national funding agency also spent $1,500 to help an aboriginal poet write a small pamphlet of poetry titled Where Did My Ass Go?

The council awarded $16,000 to budding Vancouver filmmaker Kenneth Anderlini for a video about gay public sex called Wankers.

The list of funding approved since last September also includes a $34,000 production grant to artist Michael Fernandes "to work for 18 months without the usual financial strain."

Artist Gordon Ferguson received $34,000 "to facilitate a lengthy period of time in the studio."

The council awarded Sara Graham $5,000 to complete "three bodies of work that explore the political, cultural and social aspects of commercial maps."

In any case, artists in Canada continue to enjoy their special status. But their influence will wane, and we might evolve a proper "gift economy", something I suspect that Margaret Atwood really doesn't want to have.

Disconnected from government, Canadian artists will be no more politically relevant than you or me. They won't like that state of affairs any more than their American counterparts do.

And a lot of them will be hungrier. Some will even realize that they aren't very good artists, after all, and be forced to look for actual work.

They'd be paying taxes instead of consuming them.

Sounds good to me.