Petition to Protect Arts Funding in Toronto

City Hall in Toronto is currently considering cutting funding to the City's major arts organizations (there is a Star article here).  I am completely biased (since I used to work in the arts and have music and museum studies degrees), but I think that the arts are what make Toronto vibrant, progressive, and attractive to tourists and economic investment.  I have signed THIS PETITION and urge you to consider doing the same.   What is your take on municipal funding for the arts?

Art is the stored honey of the human soul.  

~Theodore Dreiser

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.  She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"  

~Howard Ikemoto

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.  

~John Updike

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.  

~John Lubbock

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.  

~Albert Camus

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.  

~James Russell Lowell

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.  

~Ernst Levy

Poster from the National Campaign for the Arts in UK.