|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
Canadian Art Quote #1
Dot Tuer
From Dot Tuer's essay, "Is it Still Priviledged Art? The Polictics of Class and Collaboration in the Art Practice of Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge" in the anthology But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
Known as the Massey Report, this Royal Commission presented recommendations to the Parliament in 1957 that formalized a role for subsidized culture as the guardian angel of national identity and led to the founding of the federal funding agency for the arts, the
Canada Council. In the process, it also drew a dividing line between high art and popular culture - the former designated as Canadian and in need of state patronage, the latter as the vulgar materialism of an American consumerism in need of state regulation. Positioning state funding of the arts as simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-populist, this policy officially sanctioned distrust of mass culture and initiated a series of contradictions between elitism and democratization of the arts that deepened over time.*
* For further analysis see Dot Tuer, "The Art of Nation Building: Constructing a Cultural Identity for Post-War Canada," Parallélogramme, 17 #4, (Spring 1992): 24-36.