Author Topic: Engineering Culture  (Read 163 times)

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Offline Michael Hardner

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Re: Engineering Culture
« on: June 09, 2017, 12:53:27 pm »
It is important to support the arts and humanities as they endeavour to document our history.

Okaaaay.

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This allows us to look back and track change over time and to see ourselves, what we were and what we've become as a society. Documenting these things takes time, money, and motivation.

Okaaaay.

But... what of 'engineering','cancon','grants' and so on ?  Not much of this is about museums, and I only brought up archival information to highlight how 'the arts' were in the past. 

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The threat of foreign arts taking over is an important one when the foreign parties have massive amounts of wealth to dump into their cultural exports.

Sort of.  Also you get me suspicious when you overuse the term 'important'.  There are two dueling facts at work here:

1) Government alone CANNOT protect culture, although it can sometimes promote it.  It has a strong voice in some quarters.
2) People will always ask government to protect things, including things that can't be protected, and government will promise to do it.

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If arts document culture, then the absence of our own cultural products while simultaneously being overwhelmed by heavily finances foreign cultural products is cultural genocide for our society. We would no longer be able to see ourselves through our own eyes because there were no financiers to document our perceptions. That is why it is crucial to protect our cultural products and ensure that they survive in contrast to the products of foreign cultures.

'foreign cultural products' meaning Los-Angeles-produced recorded entertainments are as foreign to Toronto as upper New York State in many ways.  As such, I urge you to go back to my post and look at it apart from a 'national' lens and more about mega-money-entertainment centrally programmed VS local programming.  Of course, Canadian culture pretty much ALL falls into the latter category.

I also think the word 'document' is strange here.  Maybe 'reflect' ?  I dunno....