government support of culture and the arts*

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT OF CULTURE AND THE ARTS*

Boyd Nee1

The whole question of official government support for the arts has to be looked at in an historical light if we are to weigh all the pros and cons of the subject. The public art gallery, library or concert is a more or less recent innovation. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, such a thing as a concert to which the public could gain admission by paying was unheard of. Concerts took place only in the Courts and in the great mansions of the nobility, and the royalty or nobility concerned footed the bill. It was only in the theatre that we find the public paying for admission, even in Shakespeare’s time, so that the dramatic art has en- deavoured to be more or less self-supporting for a longer time than the others.

First, we must ask ourselves why government support of the arts is even necessary at all. This is a large and complex question in itself. I think the answer lies fundamentally in education. Education is considered as a prime means of making people happy and one of its most important aspects is to teach people how to appreciate the beautiful things of this world so as to make their lives richer and fuller than they would be otherwise. Now education, as we know, is very much an operation in which governments are interested and, in the more enlightened countries, the rulers have always realized that the arts form one of the most important aspects of education. Hence the interest of these governments in promoting the arts. Unfortunately, some countries-shall we say the countries of the extreme Right-have been inclined to frown upon subsidy of the arts in any form and the consequence has been that it was only the privileged classes in these countries who ever had a chance to appreciate the arts in the proper way. Great Britain, until the Second World War, was a perfect instance of this and the United States still is, but, as we shall see later on, will probably not be so for very long.

The countries of the Left, however, have always been in the vanguard of official support for the arts and, in predominantly socialist countries such as France, official government support has been going on there for well over a hundred years. We see then that the arts and private enterprise just do not get along together. If the artist is continually worried as

*This paper was presented to the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada at Regina, Saskatchewan, September 5 to 8, 1962.

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to where the next meal is to come from, he cannot devote his energies to the creation of masterpieces and this is one of the main arguments in favour of official support, The other main argument is that artistic enter- prises being what they are, they can never be a profit-making operation. For instance, an art gallery or opera house is an enormously costly thing and the running of it is also enormously costly. If the public is to enjoy the amenities of such places the price of admission, if that price were to be such that the institution were self-supporting, would be entirely pro- hibitive except for the very rich citizen, so that the educative aspects of artistic appreciation would be defeated, Subsidy must therefore come from somewhere and, in the past, it came from private individuals.

Private patronage of the arts was at its height at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when we find artistic events and art collections of unparalleled magnificence at the Courts and great homes of Europe. Famous families such as the Dukes of Meiningen and the Esterhazy family had private symphony orchestras, dramatic and ballet companies attached to their castles, and if one was lucky enough to be in the social circles of these great people, one had a wonderful life of free first-class entertainment. Unfortunately, this of course meant that the man in the street never heard a decent concert maybe throughout the whole of his life, so that the setup could hardly be called democratic in any sense of the word. On the other hand, the artists concerned-that is the dramatists, composers, musicians and actors-led a life of wonderful opportunity and ease. Being all salaried, they had no financial worries and could devote themselves exclusively to the composition and performance of great works of art and from these private institutions came a lot of the masterpieces which we know so well today. Joseph Haydn, for instance, was for a great many years in the service of the Esterhazys and had at his disposal the best orchestra in Europe at that time, and I think we can truthfully say that, if it had not been for these facilities, we should have been denied a large number of the great works which he produced in those years. Haydn, moreover, working in these ideal conditions, could experiment with the means at his disposal to a far greater extent than if he had had to write always with an eye on the box office, so that we got masterpieces of astounding originality coming from his pen.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the concert for which one paid to obtain admission started coming into fashion and it was Haydn again who was the pioneer in this case. When he was asked by the great im- presario Salomon to go to London to conduct some new symphonies which he had written, the concerts were open to the public and proved to be one of the greatest financial successes of any concerts in history. From then on the box office became more and more important in artistic affairs and at the same time the great private patrons began to wonder

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whether they need spend quite so much money on the arts, if the public was willing to contribute on its own account.

This transition period runs right through the first half of the nineteenth century, but we still find the princely patronage extending even up to the year 1911, when the Dukes of Meiningen finally dissolved their famous orchestra. The First World War changed everything. After it, there were no longer the great private fortunes and the royal families found themselves impoverished to an extent never before known. Some- thing, then, had to fill the gap, and we see official governmental support for artistic enterprise taking shape. Do not think, however, that it was only after the 1914 war that this happened for the first time, because governmental support had been known in various forms on the continent of Europe quite a number of years before that war. It was only that then it became a matter of sheer necessity if the arts were to survive at all, and there were only a few European countries who were enlightened enough to see this fact.

Many people are surprised to learn that, in the United Kingdom, official support for the arts dates only from 1946. Many people imagine that, in the British Isles, the arts have had governmental aid for many, many years, but it is not so. It was only in a few European countries that large-scale assistance was forthcoming prior to 1914.

The First World War, as I just remarked, saw the real beginning of official support on a large scale, but it took the Second World War to introduce it into the British Isles and, in a kind of complementary way, into Canada a few years later. I think the two factors primarily responsible for its arrival in this country were, first, its emergence in the United Kingdom, with which Canada has always had such close Commonwealth ties, and second, the famous Massey Report of 1948, which was a natural sequel to the other. It is interesting here to note that a country which prides itself on its advanced state of development and high standard of living, the United States, has, as yet, no official support of the arts; but it is also interesting to note that things are moving very quickly down there, and it will not be very long before we see it emerging. It does exist even now in camouflaged forms.

Why is official support for the arts such a difficult thing to initiate? For the graphic arts, and such things as museums and libraries, it is not usually a major problem and by now most nations are enlightened enough to realize that these things are as necessary to a happy community as are transport systems and sewers. When we come to consider music, however, the picture is very different. In many countries even now, in this enlightened day and age, music is looked upon as a “frill,” and it is only very recently that we have seen it taken seriously in schools. I think the trouble with music is its essentially ephemeral nature. You see, it is much


easier to get financial support for something which is solidly material and which has some sort of intrinsic value in terms of money. A masterpiece of painting hanging in an art gallery has a very definite financial value-a value which will probably increase with the years-and this great painting can be insured for large sums of money and can be locked up at night and the next day it can be still seen there, hanging on the wall, as a material financial investment, It is the same with books in a library, but when we come to music (always known, incidentally, and rightly, alas, as the Cinderella of the arts) we are confronted with quite a different problem. You cannot hang a Beethoven Symphony on a wall and say that it has so much material value. You cannot lock a Beethoven Sym- phony up at night and know that it will be there in the morning, because, apart from the actual written notes on the paper, the symphony has no material value whatsoever. It exists merely for the few minutes during which it is being played, and the medium which is playing it, i.e. the symphony orchestra, is an enormously costly machine consisting of a large group of very highly specialized men who have devoted many years of their lives to study in order to produce these particular sounds of the composer’s imagination. For this reason, then, it is always much harder to raise money for something as ephemeral as music, and governments and the public have to be educated to this fact. In certain countries with a long tradition of official support, the fact was accepted many years ago; but even today, in rich and supposedly educated countries, we find opera houses and symphony orchestras engaged in a titanic struggle to keep their heads above water in order to bring the masterpieces of the musical art to the public which deserves to hear them. So costly is the operation of running an opera house or symphony orchestra, that no money taken at any box office would ever pay for more than about a quarter of the expenses involved. Therefore the money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere must be from the government in some shape or form.

Each country has its own problems when it comes to subsidy of the arts. In the case of Canada, the formation of the Canada Council was the solution adopted and I feel that on the whole, it has been a very good one. The Government gave a large sum of money, set up the Council, which invested the money and now uses the income for its activities. This method differed from that in the United Kingdom, where the Arts Council of Great Britain can never budget in the same way as the Canada Council, because they never know from one year to the next what the Treasury grant will be. This has led to endless trouble and confusion over there. The Canada Council is lucky in having a very good idea of what its income will be at any time in the future and can plan accord- ingly. In considering its program the Canada Council had no precedent, because its setup is different to anything that had gone before. Its charter

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stated that the funds should be used in aiding the arts, humanities and social sciences, so that it is not an institution dealing solely with the arts by any means. The first thing it had to do, therefore, was to decide in what proportions these various activities should be helped. Another question was, what proportion of the money available should be spent on organizations and how much on assisting individuals of promise to im- prove their abilities? It also had enormous geographical problems which no other country had ever encountered, and if it limited its assistance to the best exponent in any one field (as is done generally by the Arts Council of Great Britain) the inevitable result would be to concentrate the assistance in the larger centres, particularly Montreal and Toronto. Another problem was whether the Council should meet the day-to-day costs of maintaining a local activity like a museum, library, choir or theatre group till now met by local support, and what proportion of the available sums should be spent on each of the main divisions of the arts-music, painting, theatre, writing, etc. Yet another problem was to what extent the Council should recognize and reward achievement by prizes and whether it should help more people to see or hear works of art by subsidizing transportation or, in the case of literary works, by subsidizing publication. And a final problem was whether it should assist in sending Canadian players, orchestras, dramatic companies and other individuals or organizations abroad, The funds available could not possibly be stretched to do everything which merited support and assistance, because practically everything qualified on that score! The difficult task of the Council is to arrive at priorities so as to get the best value for the money expended and in some cases to get things done which could not be carried through in any other way. I feel, on the whole, that the Council has done a noble job and I do not envy it the decisions that had to be made on occasion, because of course it is impossible to please everybody all the time.

The geographical probIem is one of the biggest it has to face. In Britain, London occupies a predominant place as the centre of the arts, and almost everyone in the British Isles is within range of a broadcast from London. In Canada, it would be impossible to treat either Toronto or Montreal as if it were the art centre. Education is the concern of the ten provinces, and nearly one third of the population has French as its mother tongue. The distance between Vancouver and Newfoundland is very nearly four thousand miles, and the necessity of carrying on broad- casting and television in seven time zones and two languages is most appallingly complicated.

Another obstacle we are encountering in this country is that anything done here in the arts is exposed to American comparison, if not direct American competition, and we are vulnerable to the sound waves of American broadcast and television programs. Our finest musicians and


actors are regularly lured to seek the richer fields and larger audiences of New York, just as a talented actor in Birmingham will always jump at a chance to appear in London. This is all very well for the individual, but it is disastrous for Canada and the eternal problem in our Toronto music school is how to find sufficient employment for our students when they have graduated. It is infuriating to spend a lot of money and energy training a first class artist merely so that he can go and entertain people in other countries and maybe never return to Canada again! The Canada Council can do a lot of good in this way by creating opportunities at home for native artists.

Governmental support for the arts came to Great Britain as a direct result of World War 11. During that war, it was suddenly realized what the arts meant to people, because at the start of hostilities everything closed down. This was the best thing that could have happened because, in less than a year, people were clamouring for music and drama, and many were astonished to find how much they missed what before they had taken for granted. By that time all the organizations (such as orchestras, theatre and ballet companies, etc. ) had disbanded, so the Government was forced to take action. They started by giving official entertainment to the armed forces and this continued throughout the war. One of the strange things that those in authority discovered was that the ordinary man or woman is not content with just any old entertainment being flung at him, but that the average person had a much higher appreciation of the good and beautiful than anyone in governmental circles had ever imagined. We saw then the result, which was the sending out of first-rate combinations (such as symphony orchestras, opera companies, and drama groups, performing the great masterpieces of music and literature) to the armed forces the world over. Towards the end of the war it was realized that this could not be allowed to stop, and the outcome was the creation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which many of us will remember nostalgically as “CEMA.” With the cessation of hostilities, it was realized that CEMA had come to stay, and out of it grew the Arts Council of Great Britain as we know it today. So rapid has been the growth of the official support for the arts in the United Kingdom, that the National Theatre now being organized in Great Britain will receive up to &1,000,000 from Her Majesty’s Government under the National Theatre Act, up to &1,300,000 from the London County Council, and a grant of 245,000 from the London County Council General Purposes Committee! This fabulous amount of money (close on eight million dollars) seems all the more extraordinary when one considers that, only twenty years ago, not one penny was being spent by the Government on the arts in that country!

In the Soviet Union, of course, there has always been enormous official support forthcoming since the Revolution at the end of the first world

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war. Artists are treated probably more bountifully in that country than in any other in the world. Not only are they lavishly supported in a financial way, but their prestige in a social sense is fantastic. If it can be said that any aristocracy still exists in the U.S.S.R., that aristocracy consists of the artists, musicians, actors, and above all, the dancers.

Countries such as France and Germany have a history of government support for the arts which goes back some 150 years and it was in these countries that the idea first took shape. Today they are as lavish as ever in supporting native artists in their activities.

So far I have spoken entirely from the point of view of the arts, because that is the field which I know best, but a word may be in order on the broader matter of support of culture. Naturally, the arts form a very important part of culture, but culture in its broader sense as applied to any nation can be anything from hockey games to Eskimo carvings! Cooking, in its finer aspects, is, I suppose, a most important part of culture in many countries; in fact, the subject is so large that we could not possibly deal with it in one short session such as this, but a great chef, such as Escoffier, should, I think, be considered just as great an artist in his own line as Laurence Olivier or Heifetz. Are we then to imply that all these cultural activities should be subsidized? When we look into the subject in greater detail, we find that it is the poor old arts who are the ones who really need subsidy, because they can never be self-supporting for the reasons which we have just discussed. The broader aspects of a nation’s culture will be found, on the whole, to be capable of seIf-support. ( I think nobody, for instance, would regard hockey games as entirely financially unsuccessful!) So I stress support of the arts as being the most crucial aspect.

Now to the final question, whether official support for the arts is a good thing or not. A Toronto critic recently came out with the startling statement that only artists who had had a great struggle to succeed could ever become the greatest of their kind. He went on to say that this was the reason that the Russian artists today are of such poor quality. Being spoon-fed from their student days, their souls do not undergo the tor- ments of penury and struggle, without which greatness cannot be achieved. This was certainly a curious statement, because during the Iast year, we heard and saw in Toronto a series of Russian musicians and dancers who, if not the greatest in the world, can at least be considered among the “top ten,” so to speak! I merely mention this to show you that there are people who still do not approve of official support. I myself have had much experience-mostly in Great Britain-of what official support means and I feel I can say that, provided the administration is good and sensible, it has everything to commend it. Mind you, I do not think a Ministry of Fine Arts is a desirable thing, because I feel that in the big decisions only the artists themselves should be responsible and that


politicians should keep out and leave it to the experts. I know it is generally considered that artists as a race are unreliable and irresponsible. The thing known as the “artistic temperament” is always mentioned in a derogatory way during a discussion of these people. On the other hand, I know many artists who have an astonishingly good grasp of administra- tive work (to mention only one, Mr. T. S. Eliot, the famous poet, who runs a superb publishing business as well as any business man could). To sum up then, let us by all means have governmental support of the arts, administered by the right people in the right way.

government support of culture and the arts*

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