The Canada Council has come under fire recently for a few of the projects it has funded. Last year, the controversial film Bubbles Galore made headlines because of its Canada Council grant. The council also fielded criticism for funding Monstrance , a Winnipeg installation by Diana Thorneycroft that involved dead rabbits. And this year a Paris art exibit with models posing as call girls raised more questions about what public money was being spent on. This morning, the Heritage committee asked the Canada Council to defend its policies and operations.
New materials demand new methods.
New methods fling a challenge to old conventions. That's a citation out of a Group of Seven catalogue in 1922. The Group of Seven, who are much loved today, were not so well accepted in the '20s. Thomson told the committee that in the past five years the Canada Council has handed out over 25,000 grants to artists. Of those, she said, perhaps a dozen have been considered controversial by the public.