Expectations
In a recent poll on CTV.ca Canadians indicated that the performance of Team Canada at the Olympics mattered.
Specifically, that how many medals won was a matter of national pride.
If that’s the indicator, there isn’t much for us to be proud of. “As the Beijing Olympics reach the half-way point, Canada’s hopes for 15 medals (as some predicted) have been shattered.”
In fact, as far as I’ve seen, Canadians have won only two medals thus far at the Olympics.
While I think it’s safe to say that the Winter Olympics have always been stronger for us than the summer games, watching the news coverage (even from afar, online) has been infuriating for me. It feels like all this pressure is on the athletes to perform, when for the next four years the overwhelming majority of people will forget all about these athletes and do nothing to support them.
This is certainly true of the government. Minimal amounts of money are invested in the development of our athletes and artists.
This has made me think about a few critical things.
1. What does a nation’s art say about the country? As an outsider looking in, what do you learn about the nation? Is it important to you when you travel? (I’m applying art loosely here - music, writing, theatre, actual art.)
Lawren Harris
Tom Thompson
AY Jackson
What does the art here say to you?
If that’s too big a question, then what does the lack of crime fiction from a certain country indicate to you? Or a disproportionate amount of a specific type of crime fiction?
2. If funding is involved, how are expectations scaled back accordingly when the performance isn’t what’s expected? I started off wondering about athletes. Now I’m thinking of the fact that “book sales in March declined 11% to $462.1 million, based on data from 79 publishers as reported to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the year to date rose 1.3% to $1.71 billion.”
According to my quick search, book sales were down again in June. So I’m wondering, in an industry that’s taken a lot of hits this year (I know book sales have been sluggish in Canada since last fall, in large part because of the strong Canadian dollar) how do publishers adjust performance expectations? Or do they? Do they say, “June sales were down 10%, so we should reduce our individual performance expectations by that much?” Or do they still expect the same sell-through?
See, following the Olympics can be a dangerous thing. It leads to dangerous thinking. Be sure to check at Observations From The Balcony today for the usual Daily Miscellany of Links.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
[...] -what does the lack of crime fiction from a certain country indicate to you? Or a disproportionate am… [...]
August 16th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I have to say that I am a firm supporter of Canadian athletes, yet I do not believe in the way our government funds them. Most of our athletes have to train and work jobs wich hampers their ability to reach their utmost physical shape.
If our government isn’t willing to fund our athletes like many other countries do, I can’t see how they expect our athletes, who enter the games at a disadvantage, to do as well as the United States for instance.
August 16th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I completely agree, D.C. I was thinking about how many of them work at Home Depot - a company which actually does support athletes by accommodating their training and competition schedules while providing them with a job so they can pay the bills.
And then I think of the limited funding of the arts as well, and I wonder what that says about us.
August 16th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I’m sort of an outsider, and I’m not sure what Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven have said to me about Canada. Thomson sticks in my mind because his colors are lot darker and more saturated than I expect from nature paintings. Whether this equals a darkness of vision, whatever that means, I don’t know.
I recognize that I haven’t answered your question, but I do know that Thompson and the Group of Seven bear a heavy national expectation, a feeling that they stand for Canada. That’s a lot for an artist or a group of artists to bear.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
August 16th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Back in grade 9 art we all had to do an assignment on a member of the Group of 7. I did mine on Lawren Harris, and have always had an appreciation for his work, but I wonder about it myself. And I think these are tough questions. Why we associate Canada with cozies and Scotland with noir are interesting questions to me. We were talking today, about the destruction of art and libraries in Iraq and what a tragedy it is to lose that part of the culture. Think of Ireland, with a banned language and all the suppression during years of occupation. When the culture was attacked the Irish learned to fight to protect it, they learned its value. I think sometimes that’s a lesson Canada hasn’t learned, and we don’t do enough to support the arts and original Canadian content.