There was an interview on Sun TV a few days ago during which Krista Erickson interviewed the dancer Margie Gillis.

I shall admit that I have never heard of her before. Usually, when I see on TV an art person I am not aware of, I feel embarrassed to have such a lapse in my art education.

However, in this case I don’t feel embarrassed – after I watched the talk I felt proud that my mind wasn’t cluttered with the fact of Margie’s existence.

The whole interview revolved around the issue of art funding. Krista vigorously attacked the concept of art grants, while Margie tried to show how important her art was, how good it was for the “collective” (a wonderful Marxist term) and why we, the people who don’t understand her high purpose, should keep paying her.

In the times preceding YouTube, she might have been able to get away with her insane views, but now, my first action after the interview was to find a clip with a sample of her dancing. Here is a typical sample called Voyages Into the Inner Landscapes:

Do you see what I see? I see nothing (other than butchering one of Leonard Cohen’s masterpieces).

Don’t get me wrong – I love the art of dance. Whether it is the ballet of Maya Plisetskaya and Karen Kain or the dancing of Michael Jackson or the choreography of Bob Fosse, the art deserves admiration because of the talents, efforts and creativity of the artists involved.

And I can tell that Margie has neither the talent nor the creativity of Maya Plisetskaya or Michael Jackson. Her style of “modern” dance is a very transparent attempt to hide her inability to dance behind a façade of “expressed emotions”.

And herein lies the secret of her desire for government art subsidies – all of the artists I mentioned above are obviously so talented that even an ordinary person would notice the fact. They have never had the problem of attracting enough people who would pay some of their hard-earned money to see them.

Margie’s case is completely different – she is so horrible that hardly anybody would be interested in her gymnastics and her up and down leaping. Unless, of course, someone is willing to subside the tickets for her performances and pay the travel expenses to foreign countries, where she would be promoted by the
Canadian embassy as a “great Canadian artist.”

That someone is our government, but since the government produces very little of the money it gives away, it is obvious that they must use our tax money to help Margie out.

If it was only about her, I would’ve swallowed my pride to say that it’s not a big deal. However, the art grants are a multi-billion industry where the money goes to support thousands of talentless hacks who don’t have even the slightest idea what art is.

Margie’s arrogance and sense of superiority shown in the interview are the common attitude of those hacks – they are so used to their entitlement, that they act truly surprised if anyone dares to question the free money they get.

It’s a total racket – the money is distributed according to the opinions of those hacks’ peers, so the legalized theft of public funds that goes to people who
have no abilities whatsoever, is bound to go on forever. If the governments finds the courage to cut off the funding for horrible art (like the case of the play, which glorified terrorism), the artsy-fartsy hacks whine, cry, curse, hiss and condemn everybody involved as heartless censors, who are trying to destroy
the “glorious Canadian art.”

So here’s my question for Mr. Harper – if you so badly want to subsidize Margie’s horror named art, why don’t you find another source of money that would leave the taxpayers alone? Most of the artists here don’t do anything most of the time anyway, they can simply start a co-operative that does something useful. The money generated would be more than enough to support all artsy types in Canada.

It has been done before – Chairman Mao, the idol of the Western art community, sent many artists to work in the fields during the Cultural Revolution. If that was good enough for the Chinese artists, it should be good enough for the Canadian as well.

© 2011 Blogwrath.com

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