Arts subsidies ­ Why do we need them?

The recent controversy surrounding bill C-10 - designed to let the Heritage minister's bureaucrats refuse tax-credits to Canadian-made movies they don't like - rekindled the old debate about arts subsidies.
Why do we need them?
The question usually crops up following a scandal involving some contemporary work - say, a movie called Young People (unprintable) - for which the artist has received some form of government subsidy.
The inevitable outcry follows. Why are taxpayers forced to sponsor works that add insult to injury by being not merely smutty but, unlike dirty postcards, incapable of fiscal self-sufficiency?
In the mid-90s a huge argument broke out in America over the National Endowment for the Arts supporting Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ", the image of a crucifix immersed in urine. It was one thing to let artists produce nauseating blasphemy if they wanted to - but pay them to produce it?
It wasn't as if people didn't spend fortunes on paintings. All an artist needed to do was to offer the public something it wanted, then sit back and rake in the cash.
Let a theatre put on a show audiences enjoy - the argument went - and people will stand in line for tickets. Best-selling authors, to say nothing of rap, rock, or movie stars, are among the highest income earners in contemporary society.
Why should makers of music, books, painting, theatre, or film be exempt from the economic consequences of their creative choices?
No such exemptions are offered in other fields. People make scads of money scribbling, daubing, caterwauling, or tickling the ivories.
If Serrano can't, he's probably in the wrong business.
Intellectuals dismiss such reasoning as philistine. It supposedly disregards what many consider self-evident, namely that, whatever the economics of popular art, high art has never been economically viable. High art always needed to be supported by the Prince, and now that Lorenzo de' Medici is no longer with us, our Boticellis and Michaelangelos have to look to Telefilm or the Heritage minister or the Canada Council for succour.
It was, as a Canada Council annual report put it, an "obvious case."
"We argue the obvious case," wrote chairman Donna Scott in 1998, "that the arts can never be a profit-making business, always requiring subsidies and disinterested sponsorship."
Hmm. I'll put my intellectual licence on the line and suggest that it's not as simple as that. Some high art is quite viable economically, and much that isn't viable is just bad art, not high. Non-viable art may be neither high nor low, only too exploratory, outmoded, or expensive to produce. It's simply art that's harder to market or profit from than less ornate or more contemporary forms of art.
Opera, for instance, which I happen to love, is hardly "high" art. It's just a costly musical expression of a tradition and vintage for which only a limited percentage of mainly upper and upper-middle class audiences retain any appreciation, and which therefore might vanish without subsidies.
This isn't an argument against subsidies.
It's just an acknowledgment that philistines are right when they intuit that "low" and "high" art cannot be separated by profitability alone. Whether or not a genre is popular doesn't automatically determine its standing on some eternal scale of values, and how well books or paintings sell doesn't speak to their quality one way or the other.
Artists who rely on subsidies throughout their careers aren't necessarily "high" artists; often they're just substandard for the market. Ditto for entire industries that require grants to keep them afloat, from "small" publishers to makers of "art" movies.
However, while people who agree with these propositions usually consider them adequate arguments against subsidies, I don't.
For me, the case for subsidizing the arts isn't dependent on some demonstrated ability of public funding to put Canadian movies on the cutting edge or set up an assembly-line for masterpieces.
Think of the mining industry. Most explorations don't strike gold - but this would hardly be an argument against subsidizing explorations. We assist prospectors through direct grants or tax concessions, fully expecting them to shift tons of dirt for each ounce of precious metal.
It's in the nation's interest to keep explorations going, if only for the civilizing influence quests have on society, whether in mining or in art. The soil of culture needs to be constantly nourished for an occasional orchid to grow from it.
Ultimately, having supported a thousand books, paintings or movies is amply justified by having supported one.

George Jonas is a CanWest News Service columnist.