Support vs Trying
I heard an interesting tidbit* a while back. It was off-hand and I don’t know if it’s entirely true but it made for good reinforcement for the way I was feeling that day which was good enough for me: It went, the USA and the UK are the only two countries that don’t received cultural support from their governments. Consequently, where do (arguably) the most renown movies and music come from?
Hm.
Is it possible that forcing a people to suffer and fight for their passions causes the results of those efforts to be greater than coddling and supporting them with handouts?
As a self-made producer for ten years as well as a recent recipient of such a handout I’m pleading ambivalence at the moment but I thought that this was an interesting observation.
Does survival of the fittest (or more entertaining, as the case may be) rear a better product and thus a healthier industry giving rise to a self-sustaining class of entertainment professionals? Or, put differently, does supporting that class of professionals with grants foster a measure of mediocrity in the final product that holds the entire industry to a limitation? Not to mention enforce a certain sense of unspoken (perhaps unintentional) control over those same professionals ever criticizing the system in which they are attempting to exist for fear of being denied future handouts.
Maybe I’m too close to it to see the truth. Maybe I’m just not brash enough to outright poop where I eat. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just time to have this conversation. We can have a conversation can’t we?
*tidbit: I just noticed that the word “tidbit”- if in the right font – is a visual palindrome. Cool. Also just looked up the term “visual palindrome” which has 1430 results on Google.
