An excerpt from that Simpleposie debate (below), just to whet the appetite:

"I think government does some things very well (health care, social services, etc.) and other things less well (environmental care and rehabilitation, urban planning, etc.) I'd put government involvement in visual art in the 'less well' camp. In general, I think government's involvement in visual art involves misallocating money in a fundamentally flawed way. It's hard to underscore the amount of revulsion I feel for this system, particularly the made-in-Canada-since-the-60s model. If you want me to start listing problems, I'd begin with the idea of 'artist-run culture' in the first place. According to its rules, I, as a much younger person interested in art, and curating art, could not find a place inside that system, because I was not an artist. My place, apparently, was to write reviews, or to buy art, but never to curate it or organize exhibitions or direct an exhibition program, because those jobs were performed by curators who were themselves artists. Back of the bus! Or, more accurately, a game of musical chairs, where everyone has to sit in a chair when the music stops. The people I always felt closest to -- Judd; Smithson; Dan Graham; Ian Wallace -- always did many things simultaneously; they were never content to sit in a single chair. So, the majority of my career has been spent building an alternative to the existing state of things, so I can perform the jobs which give me great pleasure and intellectual satisfaction, but which, in Canada at least, I was never 'qualified' to perform. So, your idea of objecting to [the Western Front]'s [whiskey] still, or Leonard [Cohen]'s Greek real estate, & etc., strikes me as kind of funny. I don't want to correct or fine-tune the existing system, I want to starve it, dynamite it, seed the smoking rubble with salt, and start over. I'll be a bit inflammatory and say that federally funded artist-run culture evokes the same feelings of moral revulsion in me as the current war in Iraq. I don't want to to adjust force levels, I want the troops home and the current Republican gang who got them there gone."
- posted by cjb @ 11:39 AM