ART, WHO NEEDS IT ANYWAY
Part Two
(See Part One, below)

The government people were right. How many would you say wrote letters or marched in righteous outrage over cuts to arts funding? Several thousand, maybe—really nothing compared with the more than four million voters in the province, most of whom either didn’t care or didn’t know about arts funding in the first place. What they were excited about were the Olympics (Go, Canada, go!) and the latest three-D blockbuster. Our governments, it would seem, are following the procedures of television programming: Find out what they’re watching and give them more of it.

Some of us remember when radio and television devoted major programming hours to opera, serious theatre, symphony concerts, and provocative discussion. People used to tune in weekly to symphonic concerts like the Standard Hour, the Bell Telephone Hour, or the Firestone Hour. The American National Broadcasting Corporation, created and fully funded the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini in two-hour Sunday concerts from 1937 to 1954. The Ed Sullivan show regularly featured opera stars like Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, and Franco Corelli. Our public schools had lively music and art programs. (Until sometime in the late 1980s, each school district in the lower mainland had a full-time music supervisor.)

In 1949, the Massey Commission (Royal Commission on Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences) was created by the St. Laurent government (Try to imagine the current government creating such a royal commission). Upon the recommendation of the Commission, the Canada Council was created and funded in 1951. Support for the arts in Canada seemed guaranteed, until the mid 1980s when government appropriations began to fall In real terms (taking inflation into account), Canada Council’s resources had decreased by over 30% by 1992. Government claims to the contrary not withstanding, this decline has continued. The same is true for the British Columbia Arts Council.

So what happened? Why is support for the arts dwindling and why is that hardly anyone cares? As I said before, our governments and our popular media have become followers, not leaders. This all started with the advent of television and the market surveys that determined who was watching what. If the majority of people are watching sitcoms, why then let’s give them more sitcoms. The advertisers, after all, want to expose their wares to the largest possible audience, and it was soon discovered that intellectual challenge tended to drive viewers to other channels. Consequently, it was necessary to assess public taste and create corresponding programming. In the parallel world of food, McDonald’s has done this brilliantly. You always know what to expect, no surprises, and don’t ask any questions about fat, salt, methylcellulose, or nutrition. The comparison with television is apt.

We’re all familiar with the notion of “dumbing down.” Just listen, for example to the dialogue in 1940s radio and even in 1950s television. The vocabulary as well as the political and social allusions are of a level of sophistication unknown in today’s popular shows. Action must now be fast and frenetic, and the sound bite has replaced the meaningful quotation. Popular movies are the same. Cutting is rapid-fire, with shots lasting rarely more than a second or two. Compare this with a scene from, say, “Citizen Kane” Here you will see single shots lasting five minutes or more, typical of films from the 1930s and 1940s. The slower pace implies that the audience is capable of paying attention and following the measured development of plot and character. The big box office blockbusters of today present us with a slam bang relentless array of images of crashes, explosions, fights, and chases. Never a dull moment. And once you have created such a film or TV show, the only way you can improve upon it is to up the ante: more and louder crashes, more and stupider jokes (with laugh track), more provocative sexiness, and more carefully engineered “reality.”

To be continued