On Sat, 12 Jun 2010, patko wrote:

...

What if I get a big enough tax deduction, from the Buzzword Development Programme of Industry Canada, or the Ministère des cadeaux aux amis du parti libéral du Québec, or Projet immobilier de la Cité des Interwebs de Montréal, and suppose that in whichever combination, the above make me pay no income tax and no sales tax on added value. Can I still be a professional ?

It is not really the question, your government seems to care that artists shouldn't pay taxes,

Indeed. The most cost-effective way to achieve that is to pay artists very little, so that they fall under the income category 'poor', which entitles the artists to the lowest tax percentages and enough reimbursements on land tax and sales tax to cancel it all.

because they might be aware that an art piece has no price,

Just because I can't sell a piece doesn't mean it doesn't have a price !

at the moment if one can speculate over some artistic work it's not art anymore,

I don't know how that kind of rule gets to be made up. Probably something to do with a romantic view of :

http://nouvl.evangelisation.free.fr/jesus_05.jpg

But you will notice that you can't really compete with how Jesus could handle a multiplication. Jesus could feed 5000 people with a multiplication. I can almost feed myself with a [#inner], but in the process I need to handle some amount of money.

it's business. If one makes a lot of money, that's good, it might even be a good artist, but in fact it's the not the price of an artistic work that make it good, it's more subtil.

How can that be consistent with "an art piece has no price" ? I thought that the price (or the lack of it) was relevant according to you, not irrelevant.

Well, I hope you've understood that I'm not talking about the industrial music style like Einstürzende Neubauten,

I understand that you're not talking about it but I want to attract your attention on the fact that there are multiple definitions of industry and industrial in both languages and that makes your sentences quite equivocal.

or Psychic TV,

I didn't know they made industrial music. Do they ? All I have from them is acid house and satanic funk.

but industrialized music, that follows rules only driven by profit.

but the profit, that profit, what is it driven by ? eventually you have to sell it to people who think it's art.

Not really, but I imagine that if media only releases art defined by political, or monetarist rules, it's not art anymore, art IS killed.

How deader was art back when Michel-Ange was having a contract with the Church and the Church was a major political power ? What with those long spans of art history in which if art wasn't about the bible it was about the royal family. You can't get much more politically-controlled than that.

_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801