Oh Canada, Poor Canada

Sometimes, culture is better the less you spend on it.

Not in Canada.

Christopher Hume says,

We have been on a spending spree... And the figures are impressive by Toronto standards: the Art Gallery of Ontario, $254 million; the Royal Ontario Museum, $270 million; the National Ballet School of Canada, $106 million; the Royal Conservatory of Music, $110 million; the Ontario College of Art & Design, $40 million; the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, $20 million; the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, $175 million, plus the other projects in the work. All in, we've spent about $975 million on the cultural infrastructure.

Now this is roughly what it cost to make Pirates of the Caribbean I, II and III, but, as Hume says, in Canada, it's a lot of money.

But $975 million is not the real cost. No, the real cost is much higher This is because when we fund culture this way, we actually diminish it. The opportunity cost is, in other words, phenomenal. I reckon this cost is roughly equal to the Pirates, Spiderman, and Oceans trilogies combined, but then I'm a trained professional working in the controlled circumstances of a New England laboratory. (Don't try these calculations at home.)

Sure, it sounds paradoxical. Spending more gets you less? Funding culture dismantles culture? But dynamism teaches us, that cultures are like marketplaces, the less you intercede the more they flourish, the more you intercede, the less they do.

From Grant McCracken at ...This blog sits

Very affordable art: for sale here :)