The Compassionate Imagination

In broad strokes this is a hard book to criticize, mainly because I agree in general with the thesis of the book: arts and culture are an important part of society and there needs to be better funding and access to them. Whether Wyman's idea of a "New Canadian Cultural Contract" and of a foundation that takes over the Canada Council for the arts' responsibilities would work, that's a different topic altogether...

I do have some issues with the book, though. It is normal to support your thesis with examples of how the things you are proposing could work, but honestly most of the book is a list of examples. I think the point could have been made with half as many examples and it would have been a more amenable read; would have been easier to hold each chapter's ideas in your mind as you read.

Then there's some of his personal views that sort of seep into the book and harm his arguments. For example, he blames "wokeness" for "trying to tell critics what to do" (the example given is a policy that asks of critics to "respect the artist, credit them appropriately, not make assumptions of ethnicity or gender and to critic the work, not the person", all which sounds reasonable to me and not like the policy is telling the critic how to do their work). He mentions "wokeness" again in a part where he talks about how a school in New Zealand changed a program that used to teach Shakespeare "very successfully" in order to focus on topics that are more "current and contextually rooted in New Zealand", and applauds the fact that a critic of this move called them "moronic wokesters".

See, Wyman tends to both-sides a lot. He argues that we should listen to JKR and Jordan Peterson "even if we don't agree with them"; he acknowledges that arts and culture in places like Canada need to be decolonized, but gets incensed when certain cultural works with colonial roots (like Shakespeare) are replaced with works that speak to the culture they're in. This is to say, he strikes me as a bit contradictory and painfully unaware of it.

He also seems to have no clue at all about what cultural appropriation is.

I don't know. I was looking forward to this book. I think in general it talks about free-culture in a roundabout way, and I was excited about that, because it would be a good way to introduce people to the concept without getting into the weeds of free-culture itself. That part of the book is good. It just gets bogged down by the author himself, who tries to argue against privilege from an extremely privileged position, without realizing that his privilege is getting in the way. A lot of the time it seems to me like he's bragging about how learned and knowledgeable he is, though at least and as mentioned he argues for more open access to cultural works and practices.

Again. Hard to criticize because in general I don't disagree with his points, I just think that he belabors the point, equivocates a lot and contradicts himself in multiple aspects.