An exchange on Molson and the arts

[Craig Walker]

At 12:15 PM 30/08/01 +0100, you wrote:
>One of my first experiences of visiting Canada was of visiting a Boston
>Pizza and ordering a Guiness.  It said on the menu that this was an imported
>beer.  What arrived had no relation to Guiness as I know it.  It had been
>brewed by Molson and had been imported from Ontario. The best description I
>could give of it would be Molson (itself a pretty unappealing beer) with
>caramel added.  In trendy soulless bars in Britain Guiness is often poured
>carelessly (it needs care) and then embellished with a little shamrock drawn
>in the head, but this Canadian Guiness really took the biscuit.  Molson is
>as good a representative as any of the superficial culture that the arts
>need to challenge.  Sponsorship by these sorts of organisations is a
>dangerous business, leading sometimes to artistic compromise and sell-out.
>
>It is probably true that in Britain a single opera house gets mre money than
>the entire Canda Council, but it is also true that these sorts of
>institutions swallow so much public funding that very little is left for
>anything else.  A friend of mine told me recently that the Royal Ballet
>takes 95% of The Arts Council of England's dance funding.  In Wales an
>excellent tradition of community theatre has been sacrificed for the sake of
>a flagship black hole called Theatr Clwyd, supposedly a flagship for
>English-language theatre in Wales, in fact an elitist institution of the old
>guard. Public funding of the arts in Britain is unfortunately more to do
>with corporate entertainment for tourists on behalf of UK plc and very
>little to do with the real needs of a people in a hypercapitalist culture.
>
>Robert Persson
>bossanova at ntlworld.com


Hello Robert,

Yes, I see your point about the dangers of blandness in corporate culture;
although I must take issue with a couple of aspects of your argument, which
I think are, however accurate in their cynicism, ultimately rather reckless.

First of all, as inexplicable as it is to those who prefer European beer,
the inescapable fact is that Molson's beers taste the way they do because
that is how most Canadians like their beer---not because of the
incompetence of their brewers, who are in fact hired from all over the
world at higher rates than almost anyone else pays, and not because of any
stinginess in terms of ingredients or brewing time, either of which, I have
it on good authority, are really infinitesimal considerations within the
overall budget.  Bottom line is: if people wanted the beer to taste
different, it would.   Now, you can always argue brainwashing by
advertising or whatever, and naturally, that is not something that can be
proved or disproved; but finally I believe that tastes in beer are just
like tastes in brands of pop or in types of milk and unlike tastes in
culture (or even wine or cheese)---given competent brewers, there's not
really much of an argument about quality to make; it's mostly a matter of
what you're accustomed to, not ignorance, not mindlessness, just
taste.  Guinness, being itself a vast corporation, would of course alter
their product to suit the market, even if that meant aping Canadian
beers.  So, no, I don't accept the argument by analogy that any arts funded
by Molson would necessarily be bland arts, though I do accept that they
would have a somewhat popular basis (in contrast, say, to Lufthansa funded
projects, which are, by policy, usually "avant-garde").

But even if we agree that there is some danger of compromise in the
presence of corporate funds (and I do certainly share that concern): it's
either that, or government funding, or private funding---each of which
holds its dangers.  As for government funding, you agree you that
government funding of the arts is pathetic in this country, but then
suggest that it doesn't really matter because they're so
establishment-minded anyhow.  Well, I could take issue and point to many
good things done with government funding, but it hardly matters anyway:
more government funding is simply not in the works right now.  And we can
complain about that, but in the meantime,  that leaves private
funding.  But who are these private donors and what are they interested in
funding?  Dare we use the Medicis as our example?  There are not many of
those, and as for their moral character...  So, obviously, there is no
possibility of funding that does not raise the danger of compromise.  The
need for money is inherently compromising.  All funds, without exception,
are tainted.

So the only alternative left is to attempt to maintain our moral purity by
doing without money: whittling our art down to that point at which it can
pass through the eye of a needle.  Well, as somebody who makes theatre
constantly---and with a laughably small budget for many years now---I can
assure you that poverty is a far greater compromising factor in my art than
any other consideration.  If I don't say exactly what I want to in my
productions, that fact has almost nothing to do with the sorts of
meretriciousness which your argument presumes.  It's because I don't have
enough money.  And while I would prefer to see the money coming from the
general population (i.e., the government), I have taken funds from sources
I find truly loathsome---charity bingos, for example---in order to keep the
vital supply going to projects I believe are worthy.

So, while I might share much---indeed, most---of your cynicism, I refuse to
draw the conclusion that the battle is irrelevant and therefore that I
should retire from the field, my purity intact.

In my view, in matters like this we are still struggling with the ideas so
disturbingly explored in Shaw's Major Barbara.  To do without Bodger and
Undershaft is not a real option: to think we can is deluded.  So there are
only the choices of pretending we are living without them and thus living
always as children, or acknowledging that we are living with them and
struggling to remake the world (or, at least, to make art) in our own way.

Yours
Craig Walker





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