Your e-mail message:

"Thank you po sir Tony! Here are the list of questions that I would wish to ask you po..

"1) Do you think Filipino Art (general Filipino art. Literature, Painting etc.) needs more exposure amongst the Filipino population? and is there any lack of it?

"2) What good will it do if Filipino Arts and Culture is further promoted and appreciated by the Filipino people?

"3) Do you think there's a connection between the appreciation of Filipino Arts and the Filipino economy?

"4) Is Filipino Arts and Culture neglected?

"5) Is a Colonial Mentality apparent amongst Filipinos?

"6) Do non-Filipino literary works overshadow Filipino authored ones?

"7) What can we do to preserve Filipino Arts and Culture? How will we benefit from its preservation?

"Thank you po ulit sir Tony! I hope i'm asking the right questions!

"_________________"

My reply:

1) Filipino art, or any other kind of art, does not need "exposure". All art needs is to be. Good art will find its own audience, whether in the artist's own time or in the future.

What our country needs at the moment are art education, art appreciation, a knowledge of art history and theory, and the ability to critique art. A pedestrian blogger who says that he likes or does not like a work of art is not a legitimate critic. He might as well express his liking for Dunkin' Donuts over J. Co Doughnuts, which doesn't make one any better or any worse than the other.

2) Art is a reflection of the level of sophistication of a community. Note that some cities in the Philippines have libraries, art galleries, and theaters with resident companies. These cities are more sophisticated and its residents more intellectual than those without art establishments, because they have already cultivated audiences who regularly patronize art.

Unfortunately there are also cities that jump the gun and build libraries, art galleries, and theaters only for the sake of having them. Note that these structures are usually empty and only for show.

3) There is a correlation, but it doesn't look good.  We have more Fine Arts and Creative Writing graduates who can't find jobs that allow them to do what they really want, and end up in advertising and commercial writing. They cannot do what they want in their present time because, like all true and serious artists, they are usually ahead of their time. The money for simple survival, or the money that comprises and operates "economics", is in popular literature, movies, and television.

Sometimes you will see a semblance of art taking the lead, but only because it is assigned to students by their teachers. It is the way, for example, that university publications survive. Having said that, I wish to stress to you that, during all of the time that I was teaching in universities, I never assigned a single work of mine to my students.

4) Filipino arts and culture are not neglected because the artists themselves ensure that they are not, no matter how un-apparent that seems to everyone.

5) I wouldn't say that. While there are artists in the East who are heavily influenced by artists in the West, the reverse is also true. Art deco was heavily influenced by Japanese art, for instance, and you have writers like the Dutch Robert van Gulik who was completely obsessed with writing Chinese detective novels.

The politically correct  word, as in food, is "fusion", not "colonialism".

6) Yes, they do, because they offer a wider variety of books from publishers who are willing to take risks. Otherwise you would never have heard of the later works of Joyce Carol Oates and the works of Paul and Jane Bowles, and of Paul Auster.

Because of the current trends in Philippine cultural history, however, Filipino publishers are very understandably sick and tired of not making money by printing purely literary works.

7) I find it difficult to address "preserving Filipino arts and culture" because, as I previously mentioned, they take care of themselves. Moreover, I believe that all things pass. Why restore a completely collapsed church from scratch, for example, when there seem to be other priorities to address, such as poverty and corruption?

Art is there. We benefit from it, whether we do anything about it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. By just accidentally seeing a photo of a painting in an old magazine, a person can change his life forever.

Do not unnecessarily worry about art, its existence, its economics, and its future. Because God Himself is an artist, and He is the greatest patron of all.