Okay, the very last word on Istvan Kantor!

[ltmurnau]

Friend dzherzhinski has been very good about clipping news stories and photos concerning Istvan Kantor's Governor-General's Award from the local um, paper (yes, I can call the Times-Colonist a "paper" without blinking because, well, it's made out of paper). The latest was a quarter page of sputtering from some retired Colonel Blimp about his tax monies being spent on putrefaction, or some such.

Apart from getting the facts about Kantor's past "misdeeds" wrong, he seems to make a hobby of writing letters to the government. Nothing wrong with that, but I think he needs to get a tiny sense of perspective:

Kantor got a $15,000 award (six others, who did not garner any adverse publicity or complaints, also got awards for a total of $105,000 "misspent taxpayer dollars"). In 1996 (the most recent number I could find in a quick Google search) there were about 20,806,000 tax returns filed. So let's call that 21 million taxpayers.

So, dividing one by the other gives us the simple-minded answer that each Canadian taxpayer gave Istvan Kantor seven-hundredths of one cent.

By extension, Kantor could get a $15,000 award every year for the next 690 years before Colonel Harrumph's personal contribution to "artistic putrefaction" personified by this artist equalled the cost of the 49 cent stamp he needed to mail that one letter to the editor. That's not including the cost of the paper, envelope and ink, and also assumes that the time he spent writing the letter is worth absolutely nothing!

Comments

[inkie.livejournal.com]

Heaven forbid that artists who that guy doesn't like get government monies... are we supposed to poll everyone so they can pick only the artists that *everyone* likes? (as if there is such a thing.. and if there was I'm sure it'd be some insipid Hallmark-esque drivel) I've always thought that the whole point of art was to make people *feel* and maybe even *think*... seems that Kantor has done just that.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

some insipid Hallmark-esque drivel

Robert Bateman, all the way. That's plenty insipid, though he has gone on record in the Globe and Mail as saying, "as Canada's political parties realign, 'conservatives' must ask themselves which they value: social order, family and the environment -- or the market". What would Colonel Harrumph think?