According to “The Walrus”, Jan. 30 2018, “Creative Canada promises nothing short of an epochal “transformation in how we view culture and creativity.” The stakes are indeed enormous: the resulting policy will influence how Canadians get our information, determine the fate of the nation’s most important cultural institutions, and shape the contours of the Canadian imagination for decades to come. What Minister Joly has delivered, however, is a paean to Silicon Valley, a gift to American technology firms, and a vision of Canadian culture as governed by web analytics and productivity tools. Creative Canada is all media and no message, a cultural policy that reflects little of Canada and none of our culture.”
In other words Creative Canada is turning artists into into tech entrepreneurs is a triumph of Silicon Valley values, with all media and no substance!
There is no value in being an inspired, original artist any more except in the service of the marketplace according to Creative Canada Plan.
Margaret Atwood's book, “ Handmaiden's Tale" prophesizes the future. That is the real role of an artist. According to this new Creative Canada policy a book like that would be of no value to their plan of being an innovative tech entrepreneur developing business or technology. This plan is the death of art in Canada!
All that tax money you throw at these so called artists is going to a bunch of charlatans who are sociopathic enough make it look like they are doing art while developing communities and business and technology.
Art can inspire, beautify, make you aware of your sensual and spiritual nature, of the meaning of life, but not become engineers or business tycoons. Art is needed in our life to uplift us from the mundane, not wallow in it.
Van Gogh created such amazing beauty that scientists are now saying his brushstrokes are an exact reflection of fractals in nature. Do you really think that if he had to develop technology or do business he would have been able to paint energy and not just surface nature? He did not sell anything in his life ergo he was also a bad business man, Because you can’t do both, be a good artist and good business man at the same time, it is like wanting the light on and off at the same time in a room. Impossible.
The Creative Canada Plan is killing culture in this country not enhancing it. It is only enhancing commerce and capitalism.
History will be the judge of our art and art world and NOT the marketplace or how well artists thrive in it! All artists can do is keep their integrity.
As an artist and former psychologist I can tell you right now, that technology will not only NOT save the world but push it further in the wrong direction, in the direction of robotic living devoid of humanity and soul, of further exploitation of nature and the death of compassion and humanity.