If you want art, you need to pay the artists

In Luisa D’Amato’s April 23 column, “What do our best artists really need?” the question is posed as to what kind of help artists need to create a thriving “scene” in the region.

At the risk of missing the point of the column, which was specifically about how the Arts Awards could best support the development of artists, the whole idea of mentorships, entrepreneurship training and recognition really bypasses a very basic truth.

If you want there to be art, then you have to pay the artists.

There is a prevailing notion that supporting art is a drain on the economy. This is false. Public money most definitely needs to be added to the system in order to make life as an artist viable, but, as has been shown time and time again, public money invested in art gets reinvested in the community and is the basis for economic development. Public money invested in art and artists is infrastructure money the same way that building roads is infrastructure money.

There is also the notion that artists in particular need training in entrepreneurship. This is also false. If you meet a working artist earning their living in any field, you should buy them a coffee and ask them how they do it, not the other way around. They certainly know how to operate with “skin in the game” in ways that many would never imagine.

The things that give meaning and vitality to a society, whether it be a municipality or a country, cost money. While automation, large scale production and outsourcing make many aspects of our lives comparatively less expensive over time, the cost of real, lasting cultural “products” will seem to rise because nothing substantive about the nature of artistic creation has really changed in hundreds of years.

As a nation, we have coasted for decades on the accumulated benefits of cultural capital accrued during years when public money was made available for artists to create and define the country. In addition, legislation (CanCon, if you will, but also more generic copyright protection) that used to make it possible for Canadian artists to use the marketplace to give voice to our national identity has become toothless or irrelevant in the face of new forms of digital dissemination. We are now floundering in a wasteland in which public money has almost entirely disappeared from the system and private money has not been added to make up the difference even in the minimal way in which private money has kept institutions in the U.S. afloat.

What does this mean for cities like Kitchener and Waterloo?

For starters, we have to look at dollars spent on art as infrastructure dollars. Consider the things that make a city livable and the things that generate business dollars. At their root is a thriving pool of art. The most effective way to keep that pool filled is to put money in the hands of the people who create that art. These people don’t need advice and consultation to help them navigate the system. They need the system to contain enough money that, if they commit the time to create things in the ways that they are more than qualified for, they will be able to sustain themselves. This should be public money, but no one would be disappointed if new tech companies would learn from the Musagetes fund and chip in at a healthier rate.

The other reality for a mid-sized city such as ours is that even more than larger centres, we cannot survive as a cultural island unto ourselves. No city of our size is enough of an artistic “ecosystem” to support the artistic vision of really gifted artists on its own. Indeed, the most effective way for local art to be valued here is for it to be valued in other places first. Conversely, to fill the artistic needs of a growing community, there needs to be the opportunity for visiting artists to be seen here.

As such, the system needs to have adequate money to nurture local art and send the bearers of our cultural legacy out into the world as well as adequate money to allow for visiting artists to enrich our lives here. This will allow our growing municipality to be a self-sustaining (not self-contained) cultural biosphere.

This balance between sending out the icons of our cultural identity and receiving cultural offerings from away is the real key to creating a thriving cultural economy which our best and brightest artists are already well prepared to navigate.

In short, there is a really simple answer to the question of what artists need to create a vibrant arts scene. If you want there to be art (and you do want there to be art!) then pay for it.