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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Canadian Art Quote #2
Andrew J. Paterson
From the preface of Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2001.
If economic dependency on the United States was already a foregone conclusion by the beginning of the 1950s, then Canadian distinction from the expanding American empire had to be asserted in a different domain. The cultural realm provided an excellent opportunity. Beginning with the 1941 Artists' Conference in Kingston, Ontario, the Federation of Canadian Artists and other arts-funding advocates "invoked the national interest as the best strategy for defending and advancing the boundaries of what they understood as culture" *, perhaps with a utopian fervour and perhaps strategically. Indeed, coalitions of visual and performing artists of the time tended not to position themselves as autonomous modernist artists. Instead, they engaged in discourses concerning democracy, culture, nation building, and public space. They worked alongside agrarian and labour activists, proto-feminists, and even popular entertainers.
*Jody Berland, "Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis," in Capital Culture: A Reader on Modern Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art, Jody Berland and Shelly Hornstein, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000): 27.