From: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred Welden)
Subject: Government-funded publishing
Originator: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 14:22:44 GMT
Organization: Dobonia


Wow!  Take a couple days off with a sick kid and suddenly there's
forty-something posts in this government support for the arts thread.

Scanning them all has been something like flying at low altitude over
a south Louisiana gas field--flames shooting up everywhere, and from
time to time there's this incredible stench.  But there have also been
some very worthwhile perspectives on the idea, and I'd like to add
my own particular 2 cents worth and draw a few flames myself.  So
here goes:

The question of whether it is moral to use tax money to fund the
production and dissemination of art that does not have the unanimous
approval of the taxpayers is not terribly interesting to me.  This is
but a pale shadow of the one true and eternal thread that I used to
participate in when alt.society.civil-liberty was permitted here in
Dobonia.  The question that interests me more, and I think ought to
be of interest to the writers on this group, is the question of whether
government funding of writing actually serves any purpose.  

What ought to be achieved by government support of the literary arts?

We should not look to the government to support the writers themselves.
Provided that the government is doing all it ought to see to it that
no one is unfairly deprived of employment, a writer has as good a chance
as anyone of managing to survive while he or she gets some writing
done.  Instead, we should look to the government to provide for the
availability and survival of written works that have no chance of
achieving those things in the free marketplace.

In other words, the government should publish works of little or no
commercial potential and make them available at a minimal price.

Contemporaries will judge most of them to be crap, or pretentious
posturings requiring a guidebook and lexicon to interpret.  In the
future, some of these works will be recognized as groundbreaking
experiments in written communication, the seeds of new ways of writing.
It is impossible to say, today, which works these will be--it is in the
nature of groundbreaking experimentation that it almost always appears
to have no practical worth at the time, and is only valued in
retrospect.

Because such experimental work rarely seems to have any contemporary
merit, no commercial publishing house can be expected to provide this
service.  The forces of the free market will invariably steer publishers
away from the very works that should be preserved and made available to
the experimentors who want to build on these new directions.

Note that writers, especially writers of long works, are at a
disadvantage with regard to experimentation in comparison to visual
artists.  A painter who has broken totally new ground may never sell a
painting (Van Gogh, I'm told, sold exactly one in his lifetime) and die
an unknown, but future artists who look at his work need only look at it
to see what is there.  The finished manuscript of a novelist, however,
is by no means as accessible until it has been typeset and bound.
Likewise, I can make a photo slide of a Van Gogh painting and mail it to
an artist friend of mine with very little effort or expense, and the
slide serves to give a decent impression of the original work.  The
expense of duplicating a novel and mailing it is prohibitively higher.
Thus, government funding of the reproduction and dissemination of
experimental written art would provide a real benefit to all literary
artists--not just those whose works are selected for support.

Not only that, it's cheap.  Say the US govt gave away 10,000 copies each
of 50 novels a month to libraries and academic institutions--600 titles
a year.  That's the output of a respectable publishing house.  They
would cost something like $2 to $4 each to produce.  That's a total cost
to the taxpayer of $12 to $24 million per year.  In governmental terms
that's negligible.  Presumably costs could be cut further by actually
selling copies to avant-garde private individuals at or slightly above
cost, thus increasing the print runs.


Now to address some specific comments I've seen here:

Alan Barclay writes:

|If Canada's literary funding is guilty of anything, it's encouraging
|"Frontier Stories", "immigrant stories" and other "cultural" literature and
|ignoring genre work.  Apparently they don't believe genre literature can
|express any Canadian Character.

I don't know what gets supported by the Arts Councils, but in the system
I described above, no manuscript that could easily be described as
belonging to any large class of already-published books would be likely
to make the cut.  So genre writing, unless it broke radical new ground,
would be out.  Likewise the frontier stories and so on.

Nigel Ling writes:

|There cannot be a precise definition but there is no doubt in my
|mind that there is writing which is literature and there is writing
|which is not. However, I said nothing about burning anything. There
|is nothing `wrong' with popular writing; but there is something
|wrong when literary work cannot get published because it doesn't
|sell as well as pulp.

This is very close to my point:  the government should support work
that has no commercial potential, because there's plenty of work 
already available that does have commercial potential.  Each kind of
writing has its own merits, but the non-commercial kind simply
disappears, so its merits are not appreciated, and the wheels invented
by its authors must constantly be re-invented, as there is no published
record of them.

Mark Brownell writes:

|3) "What is Art?": Who is to determine which project is valid and which
|is not? The acceptance of one applicant automatically means the
|exclusion of another. 

A few simple rules.  First, the work in hand must have been rejected by
a significant number of appropriate commercial publishers.  Second, all
submissions are grouped by the reviewing board into piles of works whose
lack of commercial appeal stems from similar grounds.  For example,
books that deliberately disrupt the chronological flow of events, books
written in invented languages, books that simply seem to be badly
written, and so on.  The sample judged most representative of each pile
is chosen.  If there are publication slots unfilled, start splitting up
the piles into subclassifications until all slots get filled.  If there
are too many books for the slots, eliminate the representatives of the
largest piles first--whatever form that is, it apparently needs little
encouragement to survive.

and he writes:

|4) Artists turn into grant writers! There are many out there who have
|evolved into great grant writers but have lost their artististic ability
|along the way! 

My scheme wouldn't give any grants to anybody.  It would simply create
cheap government-issue books that couldn't otherwise survive in the free
market.

-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |
Newsgroups: misc.writing