Cultural Resplendence: Re-Affirming Art as an Economic Force in Canada

Does art have the power to drive a country's economy? It is becoming more clear that the answer is yes.

For this post I refer back to my post of April 9, 2009, where I discussed the dismal showing of Canadian visual artists in the context of worldwide auction sales.

Checking the top 500 best-selling artists for the past year, I counted only five Canadians and none in the top 100. I also did a rough calculation showing that the Canadians' sales accounted for probably only .1 % of the total auction sales of the top 500.

I also noted that:

France, for example, is the world's #1 tourist destination. It also has +/-7 of the top 20 worldwide artists, in terms of '08 auction sales...

...you cannot deny the obvious - that France's cultural profile is hugely important for its prosperity and vitality as a nation and that its visual artists are a huge part of that profile.

When I wrote that part I was perhaps overly conscious that some people might consider it quite the stretch to attribute France's world leading tourism position with its world leading cultural position.

The correlation seems too strong to simply ignore, yet... the assumption is completely unscientific and could be a total coincidence, in theory.

Now, I find, my position is shared by none other than one of Canada's leading authors, Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi and winner of the Booker Prize for the same book.

Martel is also the writer of the website, What is Stephen Harper Reading?, and the book of the same name, in which Martel sends a book to Stephen Harper every two weeks, along with a letter giving a brief description of the book and random comments. In the section of the site entitled "The story behind this website", Martel describes how he got the idea for the project.

In a nutshell, Martel and 49 other eminent Canadian artists were invited to Ottawa for the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council. Martel and the other artists noticed how few government representatives made time for the event and how disinterested Harper seemed to be.

"We should have been prepared. How many Members of Parliament do you think showed up at a reception the previous day on Parliament Hill meant to be a grand occasion on which the representatives of Canada’s people would meet the representatives of Canada’s artists? By my count, twenty, twenty-five—out of 306—with only one cabinet minister, the one who absolutely had to be there, Bev Oda. There we fifty stood around, for two hours, waiting. Each one of us was a symbol for one year of the Canada Council’s fifty. I, for example, represented 1991, the year I received a Canada Council B grant that allowed me to write my first novel. I was 27 years old and the money was manna from heaven. I made those $18,000 last a year and a half (and compared to the income tax I have paid since then, an exponential return on Canadian taxpayers’ investment, I assure you)," Martel reflects.

"By comparison, the equivalent celebration of a major cultural institution in, say, France would have been a classy, flashy, year-long, exhibition-filled affair, with President Chirac trying to hog as much of the limelight as possible. No need to go into further details. We all know how the Europeans do culture. It’s sexy and important to them. The world visits Europe because it’s so culturally resplendent. Instead, we milled around, drank our drinks and then petered away in small groups."

This is what really caught my eye:

The world visits Europe because it’s so culturally resplendent.

Culturally resplendent.

That's one thing that Canada is not. It could be. But it's not.

Indeed, in Conservative circles, I imagine the words "culturally resplendent" would be considered profanities!

This is something we will have to get over. This is something for us to shoot for... cultural resplendence.