Stephen Harper’s dramatic cut to arts funding has provoked a huge backlash within the arts community but in this web 2.0 world, the relationship we have to media and culture has changed dramatically.
Blogger/author Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody suggests that economic, medical and other changes after the Second World War “forced onto an enormous number of … citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before – free time.” He calls this a “cognitive surplus” that people dealt with variously: largely by watching television but, more recently, by creating their own cultural products (art) or sharing images and ideas with others (the Internet). This multiform explosion of art and culture is to no one’s credit or fault – it just happened. But it isn’t going away,
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with the electorate given their new cultural role. Will they have a higher appreciation for art and cultural industries? Will they recognize that huge business success stories like Flickr were originally funded as art projects? Time will tell.
Tags: Culture | Toronto | Ottawa | Montreal | Vancouver | Election | arts funding | Stephen Harper | Clay Shirky
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I am afraid but the moment they dragged Naomi Klein out to help make the case for the arts, they have just played into Harper’s hands. It’s over: the whole grants-without-strings arts support. So, the argument has to completely change if the arts hope to be supported in the future of a Tory majority government. Capitalism needs creativity: it is the lifeblood of dynamic economies: that’s the argment to make. Not, a highly politicises, agenda-pushing argument that you get from people like Klein. Using the arts as a cloak to push marxism, or same-sex relationships, etc. is not going to work with today’s voters. That’s the fact.