By George!
The Crank and the Case of the Amorphous Twaddle.
by H.A. Fraser
Ms. Fraser is Managing Editor of ABM.
George Young is a self-appointed watchdog of select government-funded
arts organisations and institutions. He is an artist/writer concerned with
the spending habits and management of Canadian arts institutions. Now, saying
it this way makes George sound like a colourless number cruncher. On the
contrary, George is passionate and articulate with an aggressive style.
His job as Senior Researcher of "Independent Arts Investigations"
is to cut through the "amorphous twaddle" of our arts bureaucracies.
While I admire George's courage and tenacity, I fear his rhetoric. As I
read through his research, reports, essays and other published and unpublished
material, I was at first entertained. Then, I was awe struck. While he is
not always accurate in his details and his manner highly confrontational,
I realised that he was for the most part, right in his conclusions. George
believes that if an arts organisation sets itself up to support artists
and the arts, it should do so. He finds, however, that such organisations
usually spend more on themselves than on those they are mandated to assist.
In a personal conversation, he conceded to me that it might be better just
to dismantle them.
The recipient of George's attentions over the last few years has been the
Ontario Arts Council. Under the title of Senior Researcher, George's first
step in 1992 was to obtain current and historical financial information
on the Council. In his "A Hole at the Ontario Arts Council, Literary
Grants, 1970-1991" (Nov., 1992) George points out two obstacles to
obtaining this information:
1) The OAC keeps records for only seven years after which point, George
was told, the records are "destroyed". He discovered that this
meant that the records are placed in the Ontario Archives. It is difficult
to retrieve this information from the Archives especially in light of point
#2, below.
2) Although the OAC is an agency of the Ontario government, it is not only
at arm's length from the government, but also it is exempt from the Freedom
of Information Act. This means that the OAC does not have to reveal anything
that it does not want to.
After some further inquiries, George was provided with various OAC publications
including Moving Forward (March, 1988). In this five year projection, George
points out an interesting section titled "Goal 4: Arts Research and
Promotion" (p.22):
"Little rigorous research on arts practice has been done
in Ontario. Reliable and updated statistics on artists, arts activity and
arts audiences are few and far between. Consequently, systematic analysis
of the arts sector is in its infancy.
Neither the arts nor the province as a whole are well served by this vacuum.
Claims for or against specific policies become the focus of heated debate,
and in the absence of measureable fact, little progress is achieved."
"The OAC came to this laudable conclusion after being in business since
1963, a full twenty-five years of working in the dark!" exlaims George
in his 1992 report. (p.7)
But, how could the OAC not know what it is doing? The staff are well paid
to know what they are doing. I believe that an average salary of OAC management
in 1995 was about $50,000. plus benefits. Besides, George is a crank: letters
from OAC lawyers to George have attempted to chill his annoying and aggressive
inquiries.
However, a recent article by Robert Fulford in the ubiquitous Globe and
Mail, entitled "Debt and the collective looniness of artists"
(Oct. 16/96) reveals a "grim truth" about government arts policies.
Fulford admits that he sat on an OAC panel: "There was a poetry magazine
from a small Ontario town that contained...not a single poem of any merit.
Yet several members of the panel argued that a grant should be made, because
these people deserved encouragement for making an effort." At the end
of his article, Fulford says that as we watched government debts grow during
the 1970's and 1980s, "citizens took for granted that governments knew
what they were doing. They didn't."
And no one ever questioned it. Although Fulford never questions the OAC
itself, he does question our current arts policies. Do we know what we are
doing?
And a few more people, most of them outside the arts loop, are beginning
to wade through the twaddle of our arts bureaucracies, to ask all kinds
of sharp questions [although, if you have ever tried to get answers from
an "artocrat", as George has coined them, you know the uncomfortable
heat of self-righteousness]. Even Mike Harris, Ontario's Conservative Premier,
has commented in the media on the weighty bureaucracy at the OAC.
OAC funding has been cut. And the organisation is changing, although how
we don't really know yet. One thing we can be sure of though, George will
be right there listening and watching. As George promises in his report,
"I am not going away. Others will be coming."
If you would like to contact George Young, please do so through E-mail
to the Editor.
