i don’t know how much you pay attention to stats, small scale. but from my promoting in canada compared to anywhere, i recieve more hits on my site, more return hits, and more actual buyers going by the percentage of posts linking to me i put on canada sites. my impression, is that canadians actually check things out if they bother to click on it, and they click more, at least in arts related things. but of course, its really really small numbers i’m dealing with so who really knows…

As for The New Deal and the several programs therein formed to give artists something to do, there has been much written and little read. The most valuable project of which, IMO, was the Federal Writers Project that gave us invaluable insight of the era and collections of historic data neve before collected.

Certainly public statues needed cleaning and public buildings may or may not have needed murals. However, artists then, as today, likely wouldn’t have starved and if serious would have continued the production of their work. The great Triumph of American Painting came after The New Deal programs had long expired, and the great leap of American Moderism may have occurred sooner if what many historians today believe true, that FDR’s New Deal delayed economic recovery.

As for the CIA promoting the WEstern Ideal, it’s sad that so little was done so late for so many to have been murdered under such an obscene system of political ideology erswhile known to so few today as Communism.

Whether examining the promotion of Futurism, the banning of Jewish Expressionists, promoting Russian Social Realism, or the great Nazi Entartete Kunst exhibition, governments should stick to allocating funding. And considering the level of our GDP today, I would agree that Endowment is much too low. Our economy is really incredibly resilient despite the fiddling done by politicians.

You mean like during the Depression, when the WPA helped support and establish the careers of such soon-to-be renowned artists as Thomas Hart Benton, John Marin, Stuart Davis, Grant Wood, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Ben Shahn, and on and on and on…?

Or perhaps you mean like during the Cold War, when (semi-covert) government support helped foster the careers of artists like Barnett Newman, Pollock, Rothko, Willem De Kooning, Romare Bearden, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Ben Shahn, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and on and on…?

Whether observing the current bogus mortage lending debacle or the now international crisis of lending created by that mess, the funding of arts again suffers or prospers in direct relation to positive or negative economic trends. There is little mystery that when times look bad, economy is in correction, financial disaster looms, art should immediately pull in its budgets, shepard its resources, batten its hatches, lower its head, and muddle through until the markets turn and pockets open.

I can’t imagine anyone being so stupid as to have allowed this recent lending crisis to have ever developed except by design. This seems designed for a purpose, dare I say, political in nature. And yes, the arts will take it in the shorts.

The Conservative government in Canada just won control of Parliament with a pathetic 37 percent of the vote yesterday because there is a plethera of splinter parties and special interests running against each other. I suspect more pullback in the government’s funding of art in Canada which may be a good thing. The only thing worse than free markets, as we all know by now, is a command economy, which would produce, dare I say it, command art.