Arts funding system narrows our imagination and leaves artists feeling helpless

This column is an opinion from filmmaker Mackenzie Reid Rostad. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

If you didn't awaken to an ominous "assessment results" email waiting in your inbox recently, you might not be aware that this month was a very important one for hundreds of Canadian artists, as many of us just found out we won't be able to afford food or shelter in the coming months.

I happen to be one of the unlucky ones recently denied support from the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA), a public arts funder responsible for redistributing funds in support of the arts, which recently received an additional $75 million in COVID recovery funding.

Just like their provincial counterparts, the CCA redistributes this funding through various grant programs, wherein individuals or institutions propose a project to be evaluated by a jury of their peers. Accompanying each proposal is a schedule and budget, which can include a variety of project expenses, not least of which being subsistence, otherwise known as rent and groceries.

If you've never written an arts proposal, it's a nightmare, and it condemns artists to countless hours of writing about the poetry that they would like to write as opposed to just writing poetry, all for the sake of accessing financial support that should be readily available to them.

Winner takes all

As with austerity thinking and the rationalization of everything, these proposals are ranked by juries based on their "impact, feasibility and creative excellence". Ensuring that not a dime goes toward any project or artist that won't maximize returns, those who score highest get some money and those who don't are left with nothing. It's winner takes all and offers artists a tightrope in lieu of a safety net.

These funds exist so as to provide a haven in which the arts can operate outside the profit-motive of the free market, and yet this method of redistribution piggybacks on the same belief – that competition supposedly breeds innovation. Considering the lasting pain of the pandemic, the grant system essentially asks artists to innovate their way out of financial ruin.

The irony here is that, in practice, grant proposals passively encourage artists to do the opposite; not to stray too far from the canon, and position themselves relative to what's already been funded, based on current understandings of "impact, feasibility and creative excellence". 

Worse still is when this type of competition mixes with the myth of merit: as in, if you're unable to make rent, it's because you or your art just isn't good enough, so don't complain. 

Thoughts of personal failure flood in, as artists are left struggling in isolation over the anxiety and helplessness derived from enduring the collective economic and social precarity institutions like the CCA foster, well beyond the grant process itself.

Take, for instance, two of the film festivals I happened to screen at this past year: Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM); and Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (RVQC). Both are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and yet both refuse to pay proper artist fees – in stark opposition to the policies and policing imposed by the CCA on individual artists who receive funding, which ensure professional artist fees, governed by industry standards or union rates, are honoured.

Given the competitive nature of the grant system, individual artists are left with very little room to negotiate or call foul in light of such exploitative labour practices when they're desperate for the recognition from participating in festivals and exhibitions, which could potentially hedge their bets in the coming grant cycle.

System can be changed

Yes, my grant, my film, and my failure. Though this is a product of the atomization embedded in the grant system itself. Suspended in a state of constant competition, the financial desperation of artists will continue to spiral away, leading to ever lower fees and wages whilst narrowing our collective imagination as those tasked with looking forward are unable to see past the end of the month.

Being an artist doesn't need to be this way, and neither does arts funding. A grant system which frames artists as individual entrepreneurs engaged in the production of culture can be changed to embrace the complexities of those collectively engaged in its participation.

The Canada Council for the Arts should follow in step with Ireland's Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce, heed the recommendations from some of Canada's largest municipal arts councils and move to establish an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) for all artists. This would provide the foundation artists need to take creative risks which don't also happen to jeopardize their material security.

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