New, improved art, eh!

— o —

Historically, Canadians have not paid much attention to Canadian visual artists. While that indifference can be attributed to a number of things, there is one reason which is perpetually overlooked in discussions of how visual artists get paid and who they are working for:

When government redefined the arts as a “cultural industry” and started handing out grants in the 1980s, a now-trenchant arts bureaucracy started imposing its will on the community.

Since that time Canada’s visual artists have operated in a most peculiar milieu. Unlike patrons of the past (who spent their own money), arts officers dispense a public purse. With it, they obliquely monitor which artists become known and which art the public sees. While called for by many artists and brought into being ostensibly to help them, government funding steered the discipline of visual art down a cul-de-sac which a majority of Canadians walks past.

According to Manitoba Arts Council grant recipient, Steve Lundin, “Artists quickly learn ... that their audience has been reduced to that of academia and their peers.”+Steve Lundin, “Introduction” to SMOKESCREEN, compiled by Robert G Mears; 1996 Or, as journalist Andrew Coyne (in a debate with government supported arts critic Robert Enright) observed:

... where does the relationship between the artist and the audience begin? ... it is when each chooses the other. ... There are two elements necessary to make that choice meaningful: It has to be freely elected, or no choice is possible; and there must be an element of sacrifice involved, for without sacrifice no choice is necessary. The collection of taxes to be distributed by arts councils separates the two: Those [taxpayers] who sacrifice do not freely select the works of art ... and those who select ... are not the ones who [make] the sacrifice. And, I would argue it therefore severs that bond of choice.+Andrew Coyne and Robert Enright, Ideas: Culture and the Marketplace, CBC Radio; 1993

Toronto artist Joyce Kline put it this way:

When artists’ groups were populist, unpredictable and intractable, government offered them funding. This lessened [their] need for community support ... Then government began to grind down expectations of ever-increasing funds. [Groups] became more competitive, more careful, more obsessed with the judgment of their peers ... , more tightly bound to the granting system.+Joyce Kline, “Trial by Jury: State of the arts funding in Canada”, Artword; 1993

By way of a specious selection process to determine which visual artists receive its largesse government has written the public out of the equation. And, after 50+/- years of government assistance, the public in this country is largely oblivious to visual artists and their work. Many artists seem to believe the grants system was established to give artists a hand up. Yet, instead of bringing art-makers and art-users closer together, government funding has driven them further apart. Perhaps because John and Jane Q. — for whom art is supposedly made — have no say in the selection process. None.

— o —

Back in February 1994, the Canada Council (CanCon), the Manitoba Arts Council (MAC), and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Citizenship released a report entitled Economic Impact of the Arts in Manitoba.

The study — commissioned to justify funding agencies’ existence — pointed out that roughly 70% of arts monies (including money from sources other than government) go to infrastructure, while a paltry 30% makes it through to artists. The previous year, Statistics Canada announced that arts administrators were averaging $47,600, roughly five times the $8,800 average that visual artists were earning, nationwide.

Today, as then, in spite of millions of dollars in annual government subsidy, almost all Canadian visual artists underwrite their work by toiling at other jobs or they are supported by spouses, family members, or friends. It’s rare, these days, to read an artist’s bio that says, “I make art for a living.” Journalist Peter C. Newman observes (in The Canadian Revolution; 1996) that during the period when farmers were subsidized, their individual incomes actually dropped.

The Economic Impact study has a misleading title. CanCon and MAC said they fund “professional” artists. Individual artists who had received grants of $10,000 or more were included in the survey. So were subsidized artist-run centres and institutions like the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Apparently for budgetary reasons, the councils directed the Manitoba Bureau of Statistics to overlook artists who earn money from their work independent of either agency’s assistance. Art dealers were not consulted. The inference is that visual artists who receive public money (to a certain level) are professionals while the rest don’t really exist. This would be the same as saying that only lawyers who work for legal aid are professional lawyers.

The study made government arts funding look good and, by association, made the funding agencies appear important. But the arts councils didn’t present a true picture of the Arts in Manitoba. This is especially true for the discipline of visual art. While many artists insist that government support is the best way to go, to date this means of paying art-makers has not worked to artists’ benefit, even those who seem to be on salary at the agencies. “Once ... only a fraction of artists can count on [grants], they cease to have any real impact on increasing artists’ incomes or ability to create new work,” writes Kline. “They even cease to serve as recognition since so much fine work will go unrewarded. In short, they fail to work for artists at all, and work primarily to employ bureaucrats.”+Joyce Kline, “Trial by Jury: State of the arts funding in Canada”, Artword; 1993

In 2006, the average employment income in Canada was $36,300 yet, on average, ... visual artists earned $13,976.+Canadian Council on the Status of the Artist eliminated… Visual Artists in Canada - How do visual artists’ income levels compare? If you factor in inflation that’s about what they were averaging in 1993.

— o —

Midway through the twentieth century there wasn’t much of a market for art in Canada. Ignored as they were by the international art market, Canadian artists, generally speaking, were spared its improprieties. Our fledgling country had built some art museums but, along with their wealthy sponsors, their staff looked to Europe and New York. Emily Carr and the Group of Seven gained some acceptance, but most full-time artists struggled to make ends meet, often trading pieces of their work for materials, food, and the like.

In 1949, after a decade of lobbying, artists from all disciplines marched on Ottawa and demanded action. Following a royal commission (Massey) and the deaths of Sir James Dunn and Isaak Walton Killam (whose estates provided the seed money), in 1957 the federal government created The Canada Council for the Arts (commonly called the Canada Council) to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. Several provincial governments followed the federal lead and created regional agencies like the Manitoba Arts Council which was established (in 1967) to promote the study, enjoyment, production, and performance of works in the arts.

Prior to World War II, many Canadian universities added Fine Arts departments. A number of artists secured employment on campus. Most professors of art worked hard at both teaching and producing their own art. For some teaching displaced their art-making; they lost sight of their own artistic ambitions. A few used their positions primarily to advance their own work; students were inconveniences. All had one thing in common:

Academics don’t have to produce “saleable” art.

With their livelihoods not dependent on sales of their work, art professors are not beholden to art merchants, though many, like Ivan Eyre and Don Reichert at the University of Manitoba, have sold work through dealers. Though neither gave up teaching before they could retire with a pension.

In the early 1980s, I got to know a Calgary dealer:

Bill Mitchell, who has a PhD in art history, often lamented the kind of work he was forced to exhibit in order to stay in business. What the public was prepared to spend money on was often beneath his standards.

In fact, most dealers look for generally low-risk product. They favour artists who produce a few “hot” images over and over again.

Art professors’ freedom from the vagaries of the market gives them creative latitude. And academic artists — though constrained in other ways — often equate financial success from art sales with creative failure; at least that was the drift when I was in Art School. Or as one prof told me, “I never believed it was possible to do ‘my work’ and make a livivng from it; that’s why I opted for the university.”

Not long after the Fine Arts departments were established, hundreds of would-be artists started graduating from the universities. A few went on to become recognized. For example, Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt, who made prints as well as paintings, and Jean-Paul Riopelle (one of whose paintings fetched $420,000 at a 1994 Sotheby’s Auction in Toronto.+Kate Taylor, “Sotheby’s auction paints rosy picture for art market”, Globe and Mail; May 12, 1994) managed to live off sales of their work. They were able to make the kind of work that mattered to them and to achieve financial success independent of academia. But most Art School graduates didn’t fare well economically. Some secured teaching posts in high schools or universities. A few tried the market. Others did odd jobs and made art when they could. If children entered the picture, art making usually stopped. Far too many quit making art altogether and went on to other things.

In the 1960s, ostensibly to raise the calibre of Canadian art, many universities imported talent from beyond Canada’s borders — mostly from the United States. This included Robert Sakowski and Robert Archambeau at the University of Manitoba. At this time, it was professors, not other Art School graduates, who were showcased by a burgeoning, quasi-indigenous art scene inculcated by Canadian public galleries and art museums.

Against the disparate backgrounds of international art market and national art a l’academe, arts councils started awarding grants to individuals and budding arts organizations. At first, when giving money to individuals, they opted for Lorenzo de’ Medici’s approach: Let aspiring artists produce whatever they want. Along with funding individuals, public money went to various non-profit organizations which filled their boards with artists, hired them as staff, and put their work on display. Credentialled artists — those with fine arts degrees — received preference.

Shortly after their inception in the 1970s, artist-run centres — which provided venues distinct from dealers’ galleries — distanced themselves from artists exhibiting with dealers by calling the work of the latter group: “commercial art”. In a 1993 call for submissions, one such centre went so far as to announce that it exhibited professional art in a non-commercial venue. In time, each non-commercial venue developed its own bias. While diverse art and art forms have been shown in these centres, sociopolitical agendas often dominated.

When artist-run centres got started they were not set up as public galleries; most functioned primarily as meeting grounds for artists. Exhibiting work came later. Meanwhile some organizations were concerned with presenting art to the public from the outset. They also received funding: Main/Access Gallery (now defunct) exhibited work in downtown Winnipeg and Visual Art Manitoba (now defunct) organized touring shows. These organizations were disallowed funding if they sold art. To buy any of the work, people were directed to contact artists privately. In 1976, to strengthen their bonds with each other, and their voice when lobbying government, most artist-run centres joined the Association of National Nonprofit Artist-run Centres. (ANNPAC is no longer in existence.+This followed immediately after CanCon put a freeze on funding artist-run centres.)

In 1971, advocacy group Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC) was formed. Prior to CARFAC’s coming into being, the National Gallery of Canada was reproducing work by living artists (from its collection) and selling postcards, posters, et cetera, without paying royalties to the art-makers. CARFAC caused that to change. It helped to establish and then strengthen copyright legislation for visual artists, who now receive a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of reproductions of their work. The advocacy group also developed a schedule of fees to be paid to artists exhibiting in art museums and artist-run centres. As well, the organization battled on behalf of artists engaged in disputes of different kinds, from copyright to censorship to contracts for commissions, and proffered a Bill of Sale which would return a percentage of profits on resales of a work of art to the artist. It wasn’t until 1996 that the Winnipeg Art Gallery actually started paying artists fees based on CARFAC’s schedule. And, even though the Bill of Sale was scaled down to apply only to the first resale the contract did not catch on. It was thought to be an impediment to sales.

In the meantime, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, a multidisciplinary body (which evolved out of the Canada Arts Council, started in 1945), was formed and, among other things, lobbied the federal government for “status of the artist” legislation which was enacted by Parliament in July 1992. (CCA just recently shut down after 67 years of advocay. Government pulled its funding.)

During their heyday, advocacy groups and the ANNPAC network could be clearing houses for grants. Working at or sitting on their boards improved one’s chances of getting funding. For example, Thori Hinds received grants from MAC only during the period when she was chair of CARFAC Manitoba. And former MAC executive director Marlene Neustaedter advised me that being exhibited in an artist-run centre could significantly improve an artist’s chances of getting a grant from the agency. While the agencies maintain that artistic merit is the overriding criterion when awarding grants to individuals, CV+curriculum vitae points and “connections” are a significant factor in the selections made by so-called peer juries.

The councils, to round out the new improved artworld, funded a variety of regional arts journals. These periodicals — Border Crossings Magazine, Parallelogram (published by ANNPAC, now defunct), Fuse Magazine (now defunct), et cetera — profiled, reviewed (generally favourably), and criticized (mostly by ignoring work they didn’t like) government-funded art and artists. They served as publicity vehicles — or as critic John Grande called Border Crossings and a few others: “bombastic promotional glossies”+John K. Grande, “Back to Bricks”, Canadian Forum; October 1993 — to extend the reach of a government spawned visual art establishment. The periodicals also included essays on art by artists often in a lingo decidedly their own; an artspeak which few people comprehended.

The meritocracy soon filled with new experts — cultural executives and workers — chosen from within the ranks of agency-funded organizations. It wasn’t long before there were salaried executive directors, contract coordinators, and freelance curators. Arts admin became a career option and a rotating handful of artists managed to bed down in various government nests feathered across the nation.

At the outset, the councils’ endorsements counted for something: Many funded artists were fairly well received by the public. A few, who got grants regularly for varying periods, did quite well; interest in visual art picked up a bit. Still, the majority of artists in the subsidized network relied on nominal grants or employment from funded organizations. Many sold what they could out the back doors of the artist-run centres.

Coincidentally, a Canadian art market started to take off in some cities where the economy boomed during the mid 1970s to early 1980s. Art dealers appeared in major centres across Canada: Gallery Moos and Mira Godard Gallery from Toronto opened branch stores in Calgary. Canadian artists started selling work, although few became self-reliant. Some — such as Don Proch, Tony Tascona (who proudly never received money from any arts council), and Bill Lobchuk — managed to make a go of things. (Although Lobchuk also ran a gallery that represented his own and other artists’ work; much like Jordan Miller and Cre8tery today.)

At about this time, the agencies’ emphasis shifted from promoting the arts to supporting the arts. Coincidentally, the drift in the subsidized arts community was that artists were the “critics of society”. This echoed the claims of a small percentage of artists who received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States (established in 1965). Such art, from both sides of the border, filled Canadian art museums. When showing living artists’ work, they exhibited almost exclusively university-trained, government-funded artists; often those with a social axe of some kind or other to grind. It was generally held, within the visual art world at the time, that to qualify as Art the work had to make or have a socio-political statement in it. For the most part, the public didn’t play along. That burgeoning interest in visual art started to wain. Few people were interested in what amounted to propaganda.

The shift, on the part of the agencies, from promoting to supporting, coincided with a general economic decline. While interest in visual art had increased, the introduction of RRSPs in the 1970s removed a motivation for middle-income Canadians to purchase art. While dealers (particularly those selling contemporary work) often tried to play down the investment potential, encouraging people to buy what they loved, many people (including most artists) still hoped their choices would turn out to be investments. But putting that same money in the bank and deferring the payment of taxes seemed a better idea. Then, in the late 1980s, the international art market — centred in New York — peaked; absurd sums were paid for some dead masters’ work. Art in general was seen to be too expensive for most middle-income earners. The vast majority of people just stayed away from it.

At the end of the 1980s, much of the cash in the art market was going to dealers who raised their commissions from roughly 30% in 1982 to as high as 60% in 1992. Unfortunately this survival tactic didn’t work. By 1995, in western Canada at least, many dealer-run galleries had become tumbleweeds blowing across the prairie. Most artists, particularly those outside government nests, started begging for sales. Getting a grant looked increasingly like the best option.

— o —

The new improved art establishment continually harped about being free of political intervention of any kind. The Canada Council maintained that it resisted political manipulation and worked tirelessly to strengthen its arm’s-length-from-government relationship. Yet some critics (Kline among them) suggested that arts funding was actually being used to prevent “radical energies”+Robert Labossière, “A Newer Laocoön”, FUSE Magazine; Special Issue 1995 from organizing and becoming a concern in society. As essayist George Woodcock observed:

[Pierre] Trudeau’s view was basically that the control of a nation’s cultural life, and especially its arts, is essential for the consolidation of political power, and cultural policies should be directed towards supporting a government’s principal aims. +George Woodcock, Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada; 1985, P. 107

Winnipeg writer Scott Ellis put it this way:

Say you work in the arts infrastructure. You’re part of an embattled, marginal, relatively cash-poor subculture which is nonetheless sophisticated, prestigious and has access to powerful and influential people. The public you depend upon is well-educated and has romantic ideas of revolutionary struggle. What sort of discourse and practice would you foster in order to preserve and enhance your standing?

Well, the last thing you’d encourage would be actual rebellion. Your bank-rollers would never stand for it and insurgencies have a nasty habit of turning on their parents. But the idea of revolt, continual, symbolic insurrection, can help displace energies that might otherwise be deployed against yourself and the powers that be. Hence ... today’s arts groups endlessly promote their productions as “provocative”, “dangerous”, et cetera, while real internal dissent is ruthlessly suppressed.+Scott Ellis, “Pluralism, Guerilla Theory and the Loyal Opposition”, STREET Magazine; February / March 1995

Or, as Border Crossings founder Robert Enright (debating Andrew Coyne) informed:

... the process we’re involved in here, in trying to construct a culture for Canada, is one that demands a certain amount of rigour and commitment — and ferocity, I suppose. ... culture is not in fact a magic thing. ... I think in fact culture is constructed, it always has been constructed and it always will be constructed. And by that I mean there are people who make conscious choices to intervene in the process of making things ...+Andrew Coyne and Robert Enright, Ideas: Culture and the Marketplace, CBC Radio; 1993 [Emphasis added.]

The virtual collapse of the art market in Canada played into the hands of an arts bureaucracy bent on managing the Canadian psyche.

— o —

Grants have underwritten a lot of visual art; much of which is collecting dust in studios, garages and basements across the country. Whether it’s the work itself or the conceit of those who “intervene in the process” just beneath the surface, Canadians have not beaten paths to the doors of Canadian artists. Arts officers, administrators, and participating artists, however, insist government-funded work is “excellent” because of their faith in a selection method.

Funding agencies maintain that intra-disciplinary peer review is the best way to winnow art. Manitoba Cultural Coalition president Bruce Duggan insisted that “work of quality is more likely to be found through a [peer] jury system.”+Interview by Janet Dirks with Bruce Duggan, Roberta Christianson and Robert G Mears, The Arts File, CBC Radio, Sunday, August 19, 1996 Many share his view. But this decision-making process, which the councils and their proponents hold so dear, has some inherent problems:

Peer review asks competitors to choose, from among rivals, who will receive funding. Jurors are other artists equally eager to make their own work and names for themselves.

Jurors are expected to review a raft of applications by looking at hundreds of reproductions (slides or digital projections) in a single one- or two-day sitting. Work that doesn’t grab people’s attention — that is, art which is quiet, art that you have to spend some time with, or subtle pieces that don’t photograph well — are likely to be excluded, even though art that grows on them, art with nuances in it, is often the sort of work most people want.

Jurors will invariably select work which matches their particular view of art. (For example, in a November 1991 jury, MAC used three jurors, all of whom had a predisposition towards installation art. They reviewed 17 applications, 16 of which were for work in traditional media: painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Just one application was for installation work. Of five recommendations, the installation artist received funding.)

The councils claim that “artistic merit” is the overriding criterion in the selection of which work to fund. Yet, as mentioned above, grant applications are weighted in favour of the applicant’s prior record with government funding. And peer review favours those who are amenable to the ideology of the day, or opportunists who know how to prepare a good grant application.

The Councils say their grants are awards for excellence. But these awards are allocated prior to the work being done. Go figure.

It’s also worth observing that peer review in the arts does not echo its sister in the sciences. Peer review in the latter has other scientists verifying or not the findings of whichever scientist puts forth a new proposition. The review by one’s peers — in scientific publications — happens after the work is presented.

Many people think the biggest problem with peer juries is a tendency toward nepotism: “There’s bound to be confluence,” former Manitoba Deputy Minister of Culture Tom Carson said when I and a couple of colleagues met with him.+In February 1993, Scott Ellis, Steve Lundin, and I met with and queried then-culture minister Harold Gilleshammer about apparent discrepancies in MAC’s awarding of grants to individuals. Recorded by me in, “Analysis of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Implementation of Peer Assessment . . .” Writing about the 1990 reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts, sociologist Steven Dubin says:

Whether [critics of the peer panel process] viewed the system as too radical or not nearly radical enough, as a lifeline or a pork barrel, all these observers agreed the panels had ossified into a tit-for-tat arrangement which systematically excluded certain groups.+Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images ~ Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions; 1992, P. 289

But, as I suggest below, “confluence” is not the worst of it. Its obvious failings aside, intra-disciplinary peer review is an insidious method of censoring the arts. As Dubin also points out, it’s

the difference between overt censorship and covert controls, or the difference between regulative and constituent censorship. ... Constituent or de facto censorship ... is the more pervasive form [in the U.S. and, by extension, Canadian society], and the one which most people unconsciously assent to most of the time.+Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images ~ Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions; 1992 P. 276

Juries can be a good way “to rein artists in and regulate what they produce,” he adds.+Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images ~ Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions; 1992 P. 289 “Freedom of expression” — the rallying cry of the arts — is significantly quashed by peer review. Sociopolitical agendas can be satisfied or certain types of work can be precluded, or favoured. Says Kline:

As the [Toronto Arts Council] juror told me, his jury’s limited funds meant they ‘had to establish priorities.’... I think it’s important to note ... that the establishment of priorities within a jury is an area over which funding agencies have considerable influence as visual arts officers are the ones who select the juries in the first place ...+Joyce Kline, “Trial by Jury: State of the arts funding in Canada”, Artword; 1993

The peer jury selection method gives the illusion that artists are making the decisions. However, the choice of who will do the choosing is the most critical step in the process. Grant applications are submitted blind. Juries are assembled after the applications come in, after the arts officer — who selects the jurors — knows who is applying and for what type of work. Applied this way, peer review is a passive management tool which funding agencies can use to direct the arts in their respective jurisdictions. Artists may reapply but nothing can rectify cases of bias, impropriety, or new information. All decisions are final.

— o —

In December 1991, I started writing to the Manitoba Arts Council about its peer juries. I had been turned down for a grant in the fall of that year and I wanted to learn why. All then-associate visual arts officer Calvin Asmundson would tell me was that my work was perhaps not big enough. The jurors — who agreed on an arbitrary standard (or, as Kline would say, “a priority”) among themselves before looking at the applications — recommended that only submissions for “large scale works” be given grants. My application was for medium-sized work. In response to my obvious anger when I was told this, Asmundson suggested I try again.

What follows is excerpted from SMOKESCREEN+Compiled by Robert G Mears; 1996 (A copy is in the Manitoba Provincial Archive.):

MAC is not alone in being adamant about using intra-disciplinary peer review. Following its 1994 cross country check up, then-Canada Council director Roch Carrier felt compelled to send letters to the editors of dailies across the country informing everyone that: “During the Council’s recent ... consultations with the arts community the [peer] jury system was unanimously supported by artists and arts organizations.”

I was at the gathering in Winnipeg and, along with a few others (among them Barry McArton speaking on behalf of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra), stated my objections to the selection method.

Even if we were alone in this, just one dissenting voice strikes out the qualifier “unanimously” (as Elijah Harper made clear regarding the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord.)

— o —

What the jury system does best is select (or, perhaps more accurately, select out) subject matter. Artists who fit with the crowd (within the discipline) that has the eye of the officer of the day are the ones who are going to receive funding and exposure. The arts officer is hired by a politically appointed Council. Whether arts councils are truly at arm’s-length from government is irrelevant; someone other than artists (or the community artists serve) is setting the agenda. As historian Frances Hutchins says, “The belief that well-informed rulers will act in the interests of all disregards the fact that rulers have interests and perspectives of their own.”+Frances Hutchins, India’s Revolution ~ Gandhi and the Quit India Movement; 1973 If, for example, the Manitoba Arts Council decided that crocuses, china-painted on government issue porcelain mugs, were the most “culturally significant art form”,+Government of Manitoba, Manitoba Arts Council, Canada Council, Economic Impact of the Arts in Manitoba; 1990 it could fill its juries with artists who concur. And, well, you know, the other jurors — the ones who would be appropriate to adjudicate the applications for grants from among the work that artists really want to do — just weren’t available.

The combination of a questionable selection process administered from above with the exclusive use of system-credentialed artists as jurors, has further isolated art-makers in a country where they’ve had scant acceptance. It doesn’t matter if artists have clients, if they’re connected with people in the community. What counts are AWARDS! Canada Council sets the tone, provincial agencies find the talent, artist-run centres serve as testing grounds, public galleries show carefully groomed work, and artists are ... an unfortunate necessity.

The meritocracy has produced a few critically acclaimed stars:

Border Crossings has won awards, some of which were candidly tailored for the few Western Canadian arts rags.+Border Crossings founder and editor-at-large Robert Enright was on the board of the Western Magazine Awards Foundation. Winnipeg artists Wanda Koop, Eleanor Bond, Steve Gouthro, and Sharon Alward (to name a few) have won national and international awards.

But it’s all so in-house and of little concern to the arts councils that it’s a self-credentialled, self-congratulatory setup. Which might explain why local media have stopped reviewing exhibitions. Up until the end of the 1990s The Winnipeg Free Press ran at least one, sometimes two, “art” review(s) every week. Today, the visual arts are rarely mentioned.

— o —

Arts councils and their proponents often point to the amount and diversity of art the agencies have funded. They talk about the arts in general as being good at creating jobs, and explain how 99% of subsidy makes its way back to government through taxation.+Government of Manitoba, Manitoba Arts Council, Canada Council, Economic Impact of the Arts in Manitoba; 1990, reprinted in SMOKESCREEN Funds are awarded supposedly on the basis of merit, not, say, merit and financial need. The attack, mentioned earlier, on the Manitoba Arts Council by The Winnipeg Sun zeroed in on this:

Grants often go to people who don’t need the money.+Greg Pindera, “Culture Vultures”, Winnipeg Sun; September 18 - 20, 1992

Cynics in our midst might point out that awarding taxable money+Grants are taxable income. to people who are fairly well off is a pretty good way to ensure that most of it will come back to government.

When queried about the work itself, inferences are made that — like haute couture design in the fashion industry — it is intended to inspire run-of-the-mill artists to produce better work. Public money in the arts is being used “to raise the standard of art production,” said writer Stephen Phelps.+Stephen Phelps, “Arts council criticism is undeserved”, Winnipeg Free Press; March 22,1993 Or as then MAC chair Roberta Christianson said, “There’s the art you want to see; then there’s our responsibility which is to try and constantly advance the art form.”+Interview by Janet Dirks with Bruce Duggan, Roberta Christianson and Robert G Mears, The Arts File, CBC Radio, Sunday, August 19, 1996 Such wishful thinking only feeds resentment among unfunded artists; particularly as government funded work becomes increasingly vapid.

Then there’s mention of the experimental nature of subsidized art, but, unlike research in medicine or the social sciences, there is no connection between researchers and practitioners, no sense that one is serving the other. As well, some grant recipients insist they are on the cutting edge or pushing the envelope, the avant-garde. Meanwhile visual art critic Robert Hughes (writing about the National Endowment for the Arts) accurately observes:

Government is almost by definition a poor patron of the avant-garde. Artists who call themselves sociopolitical subversives, and then ask for state handouts, are either fools or hypocrites.”+Robert Hughes, “Pulling the Fuse on Culture”, Time Magazine; August 7, 1995

“Advancing art forms” is not, in fact, within the agencies’ mandates. The Canada Council was established to foster and promote the arts. The Manitoba Arts Council was established “to promote the arts.” Instead, as Robert Enright pointed out, the agencies are directing the construction of a culture for Canada: “... there are people who make conscious choices to intervene in the process of making things.”+Andrew Coyne and Robert Enright, Ideas: Culture and the Marketplace, CBC Radio; 1993

And, former Winnipeg Free Press entertainment editor Morley Walker expressed a prevailing public sentiment, in Winnipeg at least when he offered this take on the subject:

... many Canadians feel antipathy toward artists at the trough. The obvious fact is the art has less to do with Canadian culture.

What defines Canadian culture? A variety of things, from hanging out at shopping malls to watching hockey on Saturday night. From endlessly debating what it means to be Canadian to expecting government to bail us out of tough spots.

The culture the arts lobbyists talk about — serious music, literature, theatre, gallery and museum offerings — is far removed from what it means to be Canadian.+Morley Walker, “Arts lobby group goes too far in culture claim”, Winnipeg Free Press; February 24, 1995

— o —

When visual artists first called for government funding it was to boost their incomes and to free them from interference, particularly from the art market. In the beginning it did. Even mainstream media (when it bothered with visual art) devoted most of its attention to subsidized work shown in artist-run centres and public galleries. But as Lundin writes:

Artists are generally ill-served when institutions impose paradigms in their name. ... Today’s institutions regulate art (and artists) supposedly on the basis of merit, thus precluding the public’s function, which is to do the very same thing, albeit in a less predictable manner. ... Modern civilisation has institutionalised art, and, in so doing, has clamped a controlling mechanism on it. This mechanism is all the more effective for being self-regulating and seemingly self-imposed. The system which administers it has produced powerful middlemen who control the allocation of government funding and, thereby, which artists will be supported and which will not.+Steve Lundin, “Introduction” to SMOKESCREEN, compiled by Robert G Mears; 1996

What many artists seem to miss, as they clamour for grants, is that along with alienating an already reticent public, subsidy has put the discipline at odds with itself. What amounts to an ongoing contest of wills between funding agencies and artists has, as Scott Ellis would say, “transformed the visual art community into a welter of schismatic cults and ineffectual political cadres.” The cure has been worse than the illness.

The question isn’t whether government funds “excellent” work. Both market-driven and government-funded art establishments have produced highs and lows on the quality scale. The problem facing most artists these days is the attitude (and perhaps the intent) behind the funding. It leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. And the public doesn’t make distinctions. As this contest of wills rages on, John and Jane Q. have found other things to do with their time and money.

While determined to have the upper hand, the councils insist their practices and programs reflect the will of the art community. This is not true. Nothing CanCon or MAC do has ever been ratified by artists. In fact, neither agency has a process in place by which they could do so.

In 1989, visual artists told the Manitoba Arts Policy Review Committee, co-chaired by Christianson, that they wanted promotion and business training from the funding agency. Given that the only verb in the agency’s mandate is “promote” it was rather odd that artists should have to ask for “promotion”. In the summer of 1993, when the Manitoba Arts Council demanded a self-review from visual artists’ advocacy group CARFAC Manitoba, 80% of respondents called for promotion.

Instead, in 1994, the Manitoba Arts Council advised the arts community that it wants arts organizations to offer workshops to teach artists how to write good grant applications! So, instead of honouring what visual artists asked for — which would in fact mean fulfilling its mandate — MAC wants them to learn how better to petition the agency for funds.

In the 1990s both CanCon and MAC unofficially rewrote their mandates from promoting the arts to controlling (under the guise of supporting) artists. Plato — who recommended that poets and painters be kept out of a well ordered society — would love Canada.

This revision, though, corrupts the agencies’ purposes. It has not been ordained by the governments the agencies report to nor ratified by the artists they were put in place to serve. To promote something at the least means to raise its standing. But, so far both councils’ practices and programs have not raised the standing of visual artists in Canada.

Visual artists and public would be much better served if the funding agencies were seriously engaged in promoting, in encouraging both art-makers and art-users to pursue their own visions, disparate, regional, unique and unpredictable as they may be. As it stands today, government interference in the visual arts is a sarcoma on the collective optic nerve.

Robert G Mears