Artists are Central to Pandemic Recovery

The pandemic has revealed fundamental problems in the arts sector. It’s time for the government to address them.

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As another pandemic year comes to an end, one thing is crystal clear: when artists are unable to earn a sustainable living, there can be no sustainable and flourishing arts and culture sector.

The centrality of artists to our society is foundational in myriad ways. Indeed, the government often pays lip service to the value of the arts. Yet pressing issues – matters of survival and sustenance for many – are left to languish. 

It’s not surprising, then, that the cultural sector’s labour force has begun migrating to other economic sectors. In the early days of the pandemic, the National Arts and Culture Impact Survey identified this trend: one in three of respondents in November 2020 were uncertain about their future in the arts. With the feasibility of a career in the arts in ever greater jeopardy, what kind of cultural sector is possible in Canada’s pandemic recovery?

Earlier this month, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez announced a two-day national recovery summit for the arts, culture and heritage sectors to be held Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. “We’ll concentrate on the recovery from COVID and the longer-term competitiveness of these sectors,” Rodriguez said. “It will also be a chance for me to share my priorities, and to talk about yours.” 

The status quo is not enough

The “competitiveness of these sectors” is an old rationale dating back to the 1980s, when economic imperatives became a driving force in cultural policy. The manifest shifts in the sector since then – audience tastes, the embrace of technology, demographic composition and the conditions of cultural production – are little reflected in Canada’s arts policy. And, if we take the status quo approach in advocacy, expect to see more of the same outcomes.

Among other things, the pandemic has exposed the hypocrisy of neo-liberalism and the breakdown of the longstanding compact between labour and capital. The growth of supply chains and value chains – the activities and resources needed to create a product or service – has put a question mark on the future of the labour of artists. These chains centre the market – not wages. As a result, more and more people over the last decade have found themselves doing precarious work in a gig economy, if they can find work at all. Witness the growth of temporary contracts, unpaid internships and adjunct teaching positions, to name a few. Often, workers’ earnings are diminished, even absent, yet the way work is organized – and its value extraction – remains. The conceptual term that captures this contemporary reality is “decommodified labour.” Over recent decades, artistic labour has become increasingly decommodified. Paradoxically, the field of art education has benefited from this imperative. Artists are told to ‘invest’ in themselves and seek an art education, only to discover that their labour has no wage value in the marketplace.

The challenge of defining the place of artists in this shifting relationship between wages and labour has been a central narrative since the 1980s. Artists continue to struggle four decades after a UNESCO declaration that eventually led to Canada’s adoption of the Status of the Artist Act, which aimed to place artists on an equal footing with other professionals in the labour market so they could earn a more equitable share of economic profits. Artists earn, on average, 46 per cent less than other workers. Income levels remain problematic, in part, because of the atypical nature of artistic work. This has contributed to the marginalization of artists and remains a blind spot in cultural policy and cultural management.

Decommodified labour is synonymous with precarious work. As I have repeatedly said, “it is not surprising that the world of labour looks a lot like the way art labour has looked for decades.” This is the hamster wheel in which artists have been running circles since the 1980s. They live this tension and both their work and their lives manifest it. Moreover, the market’s recent fusion with information technology has further diminished the agency of artists while defining a winner-takes-all model, where a few achieve remarkable wealth and the rest struggle to eke out a living. This new digital-age paradigm challenges fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of artists in society. In fact, it is defining the death of the artist.

Artists’ struggles are a global issue

This is not just a Canadian issue. In 2019, before the pandemic, the International Labour Organization began exploratory research on issues related to what it calls decent work – employment that contributes to the social and economic stability of workers – within the cultural sector. Both federal and provincial governments should pay heed to this. More recently, the European Parliament called this fall for a European Status of the Artist framework that sets out working conditions and minimum standards for all EU countries, taking into account pressing current issues, like ensuring copyright income from streaming platforms. Rapporteur Monica Semedo urged member states to take measures to tackle unstable income, unpaid work and job insecurity and safeguard a minimum income standard for artists and cultural professionals. “Even before the pandemic, many artists were struggling and needed a second income to make a decent living,” she says. 

The last few years have seen increased focus on the idea of artistic labour, questions about waged work and the place of art in such a reassessment. In July 2020, I was one of three co-authors of an open letter to the prime minister on behalf of more than 30 cultural organizations and almost 300 cultural producers. It called for a basic income for artists and became a rallying point around the world. This headline from an article in Artnet News, a 24-hour global art market newswire, summed it up well: Why the Entire Art World Should Back Canadian Arts Workers’ Push for Universal Basic Income.

Cultural institutions also face challenges

The pandemic has also revealed the endemic precarity of cultural institutions. For instance, public galleries and museums in Canada typically operate with a working capital ratio of less than one. This ratio – which measures whether current liabilities can be paid off by current assets – should be between seven and nine for a healthy organization. Earlier this year, I wrote in Galleries West about the crisis museums are facing at this critical juncture. The pandemic relief offered by the federal government, while welcome and effective as an emergency procedure, did nothing more than sustain precarity for cultural institutions.  

Although a milestone report, Moving Forward – Towards a Stronger Canadian Museum Sector, was issued in 2018 by the House of Commons standing committee on Canadian heritage, it’s imperative to be circumspect in light of significant changes during the pandemic. It would be prudent to reassess its recommendations to ensure they remain relevant in the post-pandemic era.

“Arts and culture are being compromised. What is at risk? Art as a public good.” 

Meanwhile, we have seen a shift in cultural policy at all levels of government with recent moves to consolidate funding for sports, entertainment and tourism – what I call the SET complex. In this shift, what is not mentioned is how conveniently art has been pushed out. This trend has been dubbed the “festivalization of culture” in which art is treated as both entertainment and tourist attraction. Indeed, this can be seen both in the growing impetus of myriad forms of tourism and the growing dominance of the “platform economy,” which encompasses digitally enabled activities in business, politics and social interaction. The current policy push for “going digital” is a euphemism for embracing a platform economy. 

The decline in arts journalism

The SET complex has been a contributing factor in the decline of serious arts journalism, which is being replaced by the lighter fare of SET reportage. This reconfiguration of news value has occurred over the last decade of closures and multiple consolidations in the industry. Even flagship media organizations have not been immune. Writing in Ludwig Van, a music-oriented digital news site, in February 2020, Michael Vincent reported that the Toronto Star had quietly shuttered the remnants of its “once mighty” entertainment section. “The Toronto Star’s cut to arts coverage follows similar moves from the Globe and Mail, which eliminated their dedicated weekday arts section in 2017 and consolidated it with ‘Life and Arts’ and ‘News’ sections,” he wrote. “The National Post also eliminated the majority of its original arts coverage years ago, focusing increasingly limited resources on lifestyle and celebrity culture.” 

Underlining the decline, Chantal Braganza, writing seven years ago for J-Source, a publication led by journalism programs at two Ontario universities, wrote a piece prompted by the closure of Calgary’s FFWD about “the long goodbye” to Canadian alt-weeklies, known for their strong arts coverage. “FFWD was the last weekly distributed city newspaper of its kind in Calgary – a situation that’s currently the case for Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, Toronto’s NOW magazine, Halifax’s The Coast, View Magazine in Hamilton, Ont. and Vue in Edmonton.” That farewell continued with the closure of Vue in 2018. And last month, a shocked arts community mourned the closure of Canadian Art magazine, a pre-eminent national platform for arts journalism for 37 years. The absence of arts journalism contributes to the poverty of policy discourse. Nor can one expect occasional reportage on blockbuster exhibitions or interviews with superstars to represent the rich diversity of the arts or to nurture emerging careers.

In this context, the cultural sector must also watch developments related to Ottawa’s intention to bring back Bill C-10, aimed at updating the Broadcasting Act to include big-tech streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. The bill, which died with the fall election, also had provisions with respect to Canadian content. As Steven Guilbeault, the then-minister of Canadian Heritage, said in Parliament, “What we risk in the long term is nothing less than the loss of our cultural sovereignty. The production of francophone, anglophone and Indigenous works and programs will be jeopardized.” Prior to the election, Guilbeault’s department was also working on legislation that would require Internet giants Google and Facebook to negotiate licensing deals with Canadian news companies for use of their reports. The government has been following efforts in France and Australia, where Facebook tried last February to head off government regulation by temporarily blocking all news from Australia. Still, reports from Australia suggest caution. As Australian journalist Christopher Warren wrote in February in the online news site, Crikey: “The free money isn't enough to hurt the increasing revenues of big tech, but it is enough to hurt Australian journalism.” My question is: Could such a move help revive arts journalism in Canada?

The imperative of federal spending on arts and culture is akin to spending on public health and involves similar jurisdictional issues and the concomitant politics. But, too often, funding attends to the manifestation of a problem and not the source. While pandemic spending has provided an opportunity to make needed corrections to some issues, it has, alas, also produced a stalemate, simply kicking the can farther down the road.

Ironically, the arts continue to fill a role as an adjunct to political theatre. Cultural institutions are used as props for public policy announcements even as cultural policy remains dormant in the backwaters of public policy discourse. Arts and culture are being compromised. What is at risk? Art as a public good.

The arts in Canada are in crisis. Over the last 18 months, artists and art organizations across Canada have foregrounded the problems they are facing, even as they helped boost the morale of Canadians in the best possible ways. It’s time for a bold and transformative new agenda for the arts and culture sector. Amidst the upheaval of the pandemic, there’s an opportunity for the sector to achieve far-reaching change. The cultural community must rally at the upcoming national recovery summit and set a new path forward for Canadian arts and culture. ■  

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