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Government will best help to make Hong Kong a culture hub if it removes itself from the effort. Photo: SCMP Pictures

 

There were two questions here, actually. In answer to the first, yes, it is time. As to the second, that time will never come if this is how we think of bringing it about.

But I have two questions of my own to ask in response to these questions. First, from where do we think government will get the money for its arts grants?

I assume here as a matter of course that we are talking of bureaucrats dispensing money rather than providing brilliant cultural leadership. It is a safe assumption.

If any group of people sing the gimme-more-money chant louder and with fewer breaks than academics do, it is the formal arts community.

The arts, however, are essentially the product of leisure. People who wear themselves out in jobs of drudgery from morning to night to make ends meet do not have much time or energy for creative expression.

They may have great creative ability, in fact I am sure they do. Few people do not. It is a human inheritance. But when the alarm bell rings before dawn and the great need of the day is once again to devote all one's intelligence and energy to keeping the job, then over the years that well of creativity is squeezed dry.

The best way then for any town to become a cultural hub, aside from encouraging the greatest possible freedom of expression, is to spread its wealth as widely as possible. The results are certain. Give the general public leisure as well as freedom and you will get creative expression.

Now, I grant you that in Hong Kong we do generally have that freedom, however much the Journalists Association may sustain itself by complaining that we do not. We certainly have it in abundance compared with certain other, ahem, nearby political entities.

But perhaps we have not really reached that inflection point of leisure yet. Blame the high cost of housing if you will, or the high degree of income polarity, both of them clearly in evidence, but we certainly get no nearer the goal when government also unnecessarily takes people's money away.

Yes, unnecessarily. One of the big sticking points in the West Kowloon Arts Delusion is a HK$23 billion bill for construction of an underground car park. Absolutely essential, says the relevant arts lobby.

Let us say it really is so, really. Stop laughing. Just suspend disbelief for a moment. This comes to more than HK$3,000 for every man, woman and child in this town.

Do not tell yourself that the hardest pressed do not pay it if they are not subject to salaries tax. The bottom stones of the pyramid always carry the greatest weight. Of course the burden lands on the shoulders of the working class in the end. All tax burdens do, whatever roundabout ways they take to get there.

What we then have is a HK$23 billion disincentive to creative expression placed on people who might otherwise constitute the bedrock of our cultural hub. What government gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Culture grants weigh down cultural expression as much as encourage it.

And they do more to weigh it down than to encourage it when government confuses artistic expression with pouring concrete, which it routinely does and which introduces my second question.

Do we really believe that bureaucrats, people whose skills lie in administration, box ticking and balancing the interests of competing lobby groups, are the ones to whom we should look for the direction of artistic effort?

Are these the people who will make us laugh or cry and give us those rare moments of sublime insight into our lives? Do they even know who will? Does anyone really know today who will do it tomorrow?

Government will best help to make Hong Kong a culture hub if it removes itself from the effort. Art is the ultimate in anarchic expression. Direct public assistance stifles it.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: To encourage the arts, spread city's wealth widely
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