(no subject)
Now here's an interesting thing - it was about time this issue was burped back into the spotlight anyway:
Artists oppose Tory plan to vet films before granting tax credits
Last Updated: Thursday, February 28, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET
The Canadian Press
Canada's arts community is condemning proposed changes to the Income Tax Act that would allow the federal government to pull financial help for film or television programs that it finds offensive or not in the public interest.
The amendment to Bill C-10 would allow the Heritage Minister to cancel tax credits for such projects, even if government agencies have invested in them.
Representatives from the Heritage and Justice departments would determine which productions are unsuitable and would be denied tax cuts.
The organization representing Canadian actors says the changes have grave implications for artists and are morally offensive to modern Canadian society.
Stephen Waddell, national executive director of the actors' union ACTRA, says the arts community is concerned about who exactly would make the decision as to what would be offensive.
He said it seems the government wants to set up a form of "morality police."
"The government is overstepping its bounds and interfering in an arms-length process," Waddell said in a statement released Thursday. "Withholding public funding for film and television productions it deems offensive is a dangerous direction for this government that smacks of censorship."
Waddell said he wonders whether the standards to be applied would be representative of a modern Canadian society or what he calls a "fundamentalist perspective" borrowed from the United States.
© The Canadian Press, 2008
Well, yes, of course this is censorship, and the terms "offensive" or "not in the public interest" are flabby as all get-out, and potentially this does lend itself to all kinds of abuse. So what next?
I'm not sure whether this notion comes from a "fundamentalist perspective" as the man alleges above, images of the Mapplethorpe-Helms-NEA debacle running through his head. These things seem to come up every time an artist who's received public funding (at the time or in the past) does something someone else doesn't like, or whenever some politician remembers once seeing something he didn't like and realizes all over again that there's always a good percentage in going after Culture That Isn't Robert Bateman. It also seems to me that regardless of which party is in power in Canada, the Heritage Minister always seems to be someone who doesn't have much use for or personal interest in the portfolio - seems to be kind of a loser post.
I have to say I am quite ambivalent on the general issue of public funding for the arts. The fact of the matter is, whether public funding was involved or not, there will be some art - perhaps I should say "entertainment", since films and TV are what's being discussed in this case - that some people don't "get", don't like, and don't want. David Cronenberg's infamous film Shivers, one of the first to get assistance from the Canada Film Development Corporation was savaged by Reggie Fulford in Saturday Night magazine in 1975 as "an atrocity" and "the most repulsive film I have ever seen", and concluded with the statement "If using public money to produce films like this is the only way English Canada can have a film industry, then perhaps English Canada should not have a film industry."
The fact is, there is no agency, organization, board or council that should determine the artistic merit of anything. The concept has no objective reality. It cannot be anything other than a strictly individual decision, one of the few left to us. Die Gedanken as I like to say so often, sind frei.
From there it's an easy jump to the idealistic position that there should be no government funding for the arts, in any form, not no way, not no how. I never got any Canada Council grants for the numerous and minor provocations and creative atrocities I've inflicted on the world in my time, nor was I ever accountable to anyone, not even the postman who delivered my work to its unwitting recipient. But that's too much of an easy out, almost as impractical as demanding there should be unlimited public funding for anyone who wants to do anything creative.
It certainly does not work for films and TV, because these are expensive to make - and there's the important difference! It's a truism that it takes money to make money, and the only reason why there continues to be even a vestige of a cultural industry in this country is because it does make money. Shivers made money - no one expected it to, but it did. And while it was being made, people running the cameras, making sandwiches, and mopping up the fake blood and goo were putting food on their respective tables when they went home at night. Can't be all bad.
So, does "not in the public interest" necessarily mean "unsaleable or not commercially viable"? Some (but not all people) in Stephen Harper's government would take the semi-libertarian argument that the ultimate arbiter for culture is the marketplace. If people pay to look at it, there must be something in it. Others in that government wouldn't even want you to see so much as some side-boob, no matter how much you wanted to pay, because government, in their view, has to be some kind of moral enforcer.
Anyway, I am rather going in circles here because I don't have the answer - that's why I say I'm ambivalent about the issue. Would like to hear your thoughts.
Artists oppose Tory plan to vet films before granting tax credits
Last Updated: Thursday, February 28, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET
The Canadian Press
Canada's arts community is condemning proposed changes to the Income Tax Act that would allow the federal government to pull financial help for film or television programs that it finds offensive or not in the public interest.
The amendment to Bill C-10 would allow the Heritage Minister to cancel tax credits for such projects, even if government agencies have invested in them.
Representatives from the Heritage and Justice departments would determine which productions are unsuitable and would be denied tax cuts.
The organization representing Canadian actors says the changes have grave implications for artists and are morally offensive to modern Canadian society.
Stephen Waddell, national executive director of the actors' union ACTRA, says the arts community is concerned about who exactly would make the decision as to what would be offensive.
He said it seems the government wants to set up a form of "morality police."
"The government is overstepping its bounds and interfering in an arms-length process," Waddell said in a statement released Thursday. "Withholding public funding for film and television productions it deems offensive is a dangerous direction for this government that smacks of censorship."
Waddell said he wonders whether the standards to be applied would be representative of a modern Canadian society or what he calls a "fundamentalist perspective" borrowed from the United States.
© The Canadian Press, 2008
Well, yes, of course this is censorship, and the terms "offensive" or "not in the public interest" are flabby as all get-out, and potentially this does lend itself to all kinds of abuse. So what next?
I'm not sure whether this notion comes from a "fundamentalist perspective" as the man alleges above, images of the Mapplethorpe-Helms-NEA debacle running through his head. These things seem to come up every time an artist who's received public funding (at the time or in the past) does something someone else doesn't like, or whenever some politician remembers once seeing something he didn't like and realizes all over again that there's always a good percentage in going after Culture That Isn't Robert Bateman. It also seems to me that regardless of which party is in power in Canada, the Heritage Minister always seems to be someone who doesn't have much use for or personal interest in the portfolio - seems to be kind of a loser post.
I have to say I am quite ambivalent on the general issue of public funding for the arts. The fact of the matter is, whether public funding was involved or not, there will be some art - perhaps I should say "entertainment", since films and TV are what's being discussed in this case - that some people don't "get", don't like, and don't want. David Cronenberg's infamous film Shivers, one of the first to get assistance from the Canada Film Development Corporation was savaged by Reggie Fulford in Saturday Night magazine in 1975 as "an atrocity" and "the most repulsive film I have ever seen", and concluded with the statement "If using public money to produce films like this is the only way English Canada can have a film industry, then perhaps English Canada should not have a film industry."
The fact is, there is no agency, organization, board or council that should determine the artistic merit of anything. The concept has no objective reality. It cannot be anything other than a strictly individual decision, one of the few left to us. Die Gedanken as I like to say so often, sind frei.
From there it's an easy jump to the idealistic position that there should be no government funding for the arts, in any form, not no way, not no how. I never got any Canada Council grants for the numerous and minor provocations and creative atrocities I've inflicted on the world in my time, nor was I ever accountable to anyone, not even the postman who delivered my work to its unwitting recipient. But that's too much of an easy out, almost as impractical as demanding there should be unlimited public funding for anyone who wants to do anything creative.
It certainly does not work for films and TV, because these are expensive to make - and there's the important difference! It's a truism that it takes money to make money, and the only reason why there continues to be even a vestige of a cultural industry in this country is because it does make money. Shivers made money - no one expected it to, but it did. And while it was being made, people running the cameras, making sandwiches, and mopping up the fake blood and goo were putting food on their respective tables when they went home at night. Can't be all bad.
So, does "not in the public interest" necessarily mean "unsaleable or not commercially viable"? Some (but not all people) in Stephen Harper's government would take the semi-libertarian argument that the ultimate arbiter for culture is the marketplace. If people pay to look at it, there must be something in it. Others in that government wouldn't even want you to see so much as some side-boob, no matter how much you wanted to pay, because government, in their view, has to be some kind of moral enforcer.
Anyway, I am rather going in circles here because I don't have the answer - that's why I say I'm ambivalent about the issue. Would like to hear your thoughts.