Hands off my art pt. 2 - the protest

[The following is a bit of a rewrite of a post first made on my own blog.]

The recent arts funding cuts hit very close to home, given my involvement with the Montreal Biennale. Two major partners with the Biennale have suffered greatly from these announcements: the SAT will lose up to 25% of its budget, and INIS‘ is set back nearly $900,000. Needless to say, Harper’s cuts have thrown a major monkey wrench into the proceedings. Claudio Marzano assures me that everything will ultimately go as planned. However, the two aforementioned organizations aren’t just partners with the Biennale: the SAT is a key venue in the city for all sorts of forward-thinking multimedia projects, including the MUTEK festival; and the INIS has long been a training ground and immensely valuable asset to the health of Québécois (and Canadian) cinema and television.

Present at this morning’s protest were many luminaries of the Montreal arts scene including the Biennale’s Claude Gosselin, Spectra’s André Menard, Walter Boudreau from the SMCQ, and Michel G. Desjardins from INIS. Estimates have the audience around 3000 - and the SAT was packed. I spotted fellow Indyish member Paul Neudorf there - hopefully Indyish was in full effect.

At times it got political, with anti-Conservative and pro-sovereignist strains abounding - Boudreau even riffed on the cuts being similar to Hitler’s Final Solution. I’m not sure that the more “radical” testimonies did anything to endear us flaming lefty artists to more conservative masses: those that think artists are a bunch of parasites mooching off hard-earned tax dollars; those that believe the market will bear out the support for the best art. I was happy to see representatives from the business and administration community, to lend credence and support to what should be common sense.

It should be abundantly clear that arts and culture are the lifeblood of civilization, and I agreed most with the business representative (whose name I forget) who said that the promotion of arts, culture and tolerance is Canada’s trademark to the world which must be promulgated and protected. Another panelist gave the figure that culture accounts for 8% of Canada’s GDP. I know that the majority of Quebec and Ontario tourism money comes from cultural events - festivals and the like. To quote yet another panelist, at a time when many European countries, as well as Australia, are dumping money into cultural exchange programs, Harper’s massive cuts place him in stark contrast with the rest of the cultural world. Yes, Harper and his crew are eminently out of touch with the role culture plays in Canada, especially Quebec, and abroad. But it must be made clear to those who share Harper’s views that artists are not merely leeches on the government system. It is funding from organizations like PromArt and training from INIS that allow Canada to be a player on the world’s cultural stage. These are entities that should not be fundamentally jeopardized just because someone gets his or her knickers in a knot over an expletive in a band name.

The best part was seeing 3000 artists, across disciplines, in solidarity at the SAT. It is essential that artists band together in community - whether it’s local, like Indyish, national or global. Nous vaincrons!