Make a new New Cultural Policy for the Arts that is called “Creative Canada”.
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 of many years 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.
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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.

Queen West Art Crawl is on at Trinity Park today and tomorrow. I remember when it first started years ago, it was a juried exhibition and you had to be a professional artist to get in. It was worth seeing and some people actually sold or found galleries through it. Today anybody if they pay the money can show. So I saw a sign "I love life and colour" and really awful colours thrown on a canvas. I am happy the person loves life and colour but really wish she/he wouldn't call herself/himself an artist.
It seems that communicating anything real in art has gone out the window. It is all about decorating and selling now.

I am curious what happens in the long run with young people used to reading articles about human suffering and horrors with half page ads sprawled along the pages touting sex and material goods. Visual statements always have a stronger impact on our brains than words. The ads stop us from having emotions about what we are reading, they interfere with our ability to digest the words and have a reaction. In other words the ads block our emotions to the article!

What do you think will happen to our young people overtime? They will either stop reading the articles so as to not get frustrated or become immune to their feelings. I think this is a big factor in why our society is as apathetic as it is to the suffering of others, to homelessness, to illness, to abuse...especially among our millennials. They prefer instagram to FB now because there is nothing to read there, just fun photos...it is not just a ploy to avoid seeing the suffering of the world but a way to save their humanity.
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In the past we read books or newspaper held in our hands and had time to ponder what we were reading, digest it, have an opinion. Put it down and pick it up again, immerse ourselves in the thoughts. Not anymore!
The internet is a tool of Capitalism only now, it has killed our compassion and humanity and brains. Intellectualism is dead. And will totally disappear if people like Doug Ford and Trump have their way.

In ancient lore shamans were magic practitioners that helped shape the first human societies.
As wise as they were feared, the shaman mystics were a high-rank figure in the
human society, capable of winning battles, de-cursing allies, they could heal physical
wounds and the soul, and also communicate with animal spirits and even shape shift.
In 2012, archaeologists uncovered an unusual site near Lake Świdwie, in north-western
Poland. After meticulously analyzing the settlement using modern techniques, the team
of researchers concluded that it dated back more than 9,000 years.
Yew blades were found near the lake Swidwie in POLAND...This discovery is unique, as
found in other shaman settlements in Siberia and Mongolia only. It apparently served as
a sanctuary from where the spirit practitioners engaged into rituals and out-of-body experiences
which are now out of reach for modern science or written history. It demonstrates
that ancient Europeans had knowledgeable advisors who could read the stars,
use advanced remedies from nature, and who knows what other ancient techniques that
are now forever lost.
Artists-as-shamans are needed in these warring times. Art heals and reveals that which
science cannot. These artists are people in a quest for life's deeper meaning. Shamanism
is universally concerned with the well-being of both nature and human nature, and
the relationship between them. How can modernity know so little for knowing so much?
In making art, the artist breathes herself out to allow the breathing in of universal air, intelligent
with many minds, alive with energy. Artist, shape-shifter, shaman or poet, all are
lovers of metamorphosis, all are capable of visions, insights and dreams.
Real artists have taken up the role of the shaman in our times. Possibly because both
art and shamanism use the realm of metaphor where feeling is expressed and where
healing happens. With metaphoric vision, empathy flows, knowing no borders. Both
artist and shaman create harmony within an individual, and between the individual and
the wider environment, a way of thinking essential for life, which we have almost forgotten
about in our pursuit of money and technology and power.
I saw the video "Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present" yesterday, showing all her
monumental exhibits and previous performance pieces...that woman is a true artistshaman!
Marina Abramovic, born in Yugoslavia in 1946, has a career that spans approximately
fifty works over four decades of interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations,
photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances.
"The Artist is Present" is the longest solo performance ever undertaken by an artist in a
museum setting, MOMA. For 3 months everyday for 8 hours a day, Marina sat still in a
chair inviting the audience to take turns sitting in a chair opposite her in silence with
locked eye contact. It turns out that if you can empty your mind each time before, you
can connect with the other stranger's essence and many many people were so moved
by this connection with Marina that tears rolled down their faces in joy.
Now this is an example of how art can be transformative, just as a shaman in ancient
societies transformed people with their spells.
Marina's earlier performance pieces were also dramatic, pointing to hidden aspects of
human nature, which is what art should really be about. Since her early days in Serbia,
Marina has put herself under extreme physical and mental duress to jolt viewers out of
ordinary patterns of thinking. When she cut herself with a knife, or slammed her body
into a wall, it was done with such purity, the viewer was lifted temporarily out of themselves.
It is the opposite of sensationalism or exhibitionism, it is pure magic to behold.
Artists often suffer in their youth, according to Joseph Campbell, as if ‘the whole unconscious
has opened up and they’ve fallen into it’. Shamanism, like art, is a calling, and a
young person may be ‘doomed to inspiration’ as the anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras
wrote of the Siberian shamanic vocation. In a painful transformation lasting months or
years, the young shaman loses interest in life, eats little, is withdrawn or mute, sleeping
most of the time. It reads like a portrait of the young artist in a devastating depression.
The young shaman overcomes the illness through the practice of shamanism, just as
many artists know that their own best medicine is found in their work, like Van Gogh,
who was guided by the sun from the dark side of the mind, to the ecstasy of being.