Do the Arts Perform Poverty?

Dear Canadian arts workers and organizations, we are welcoming back our beloved national funder this week. I was too exhausted to submit any grant applications before the portal went down, but I salute all of you who managed to put a handful of them in before it went down in March.

The funding scarcity is doing a number on "the sector," but for the most part, it feels business as usual. We were squeezing every dime and repeatedly whispering to ourselves to be just a little more resilient, even before this.

A new round of grantwriting begins. Abandoning all entrepreneurial efforts to overhaul the business model in the arts is very tempting at this point—why become a sellout when the old reliable ways are back on the table again?

This dispatch is part 2 of a 3-part series of notes on challenges emerging from the question of how artists make money in the Canadian context.

No, this post is actually not about pigeons, even though there's a pigeon renaissance going on.

We tend to talk about surveillance as someone else’s wrongdoing. But what happens when it becomes a habit to surveil ourselves, to censor ourselves? 

Self-surveillance via algorithms creates what internet theorists call the algorithmic gaze—a curated aesthetic to align with a superficial sense of belonging shaped by the desire to perform or for viewing oneself on digital platforms. To maintain a curated image on the internet, we cull anything that isn't contributing to "the aesthetics" brands, curators, and other gatekeepers look for in one's account. Utilitarian aesthetic mimicking shipping labels or digital interfaces juxtaposed next to a rock signals a desire to be taken as practical, functional, down to earth, and real. While the data and information presented tend to be arbitrary, the inhibition of the utilitarian aesthetic is an attempt to be a certain way without living a life coherent with the aesthetics.

More information, more data, more functionality, and more utility... they all contribute to making better decisions, right?

In deciding whether to pursue a fairly labour-intensive grant application a few months ago, I was advised by an expert to make UKAI Projects’ web presence more Toronto-centric for a specific grantmaker evaluating impact by catchment area, as that’s what the jurors will be looking at. The amount is attractive. The suggestion is kindhearted, perhaps from a place of wanting us to survive a scarce fund environment. I appreciate the advice. Still, it makes me wonder how much of being authentic means performing skillfully enough for the performance to be undetectable.

Around the same time, under the possibility of securing a U.S.-based grant, I went through an Equivalency Determination process: a way for a non-U.S. nonprofit to be treated as if it were a U.S. 501(c)(3) by the grantmaker. Arts and Culture are a charitable act listed alongside human rights, poverty relief, and other far more life-and-death scenarios. This feels hard to swallow—not because of the severity or the nature of those causes, but because these listed causes situate the beneficiary in a position of dependence, unable to get out of the root cause of their perils, let alone to reciprocate. The power is never in the hands of those who receive such “kind gifts” and never will be. This certification proved itself useless as the fund itself vanished in the name of political uncertainty. However, across its 14-page online form and emails from the grantmaker’s legal auditor asking for more justifications upon more justifications, it provided valuable insight into the art of justifying the cause through morals and ethics of having "significant social value," performing poverty, all while maintaining audited financial records, which prove that your organization is, in fact, economically sustainable and compliant.

The laments often surround us that rising costs of maintaining arts spaces are driving artists out of neighbourhoods that benefit from the arts, despite their significant contributions to our society's well-being. Do artists and arts organizations deserve cheap space, low rent, or a UBI more than other people? I think not. Not when we use the word "deserve." When an arts organization negotiates for free or reduced rent in a downtown city block, that is an exchange of value disguised as charitable giving. When the gifts keep on coming, the giver is generously supporting the arts. As soon as it stops, the former giver is framed as the villain for threatening the sustainability of the arts. The arts and cultural sector is readily associated with image-making for the wealthy and powerful—this is no exception. Art as a form of self-expression under this system cannot escape the fact that it is either a reflection of wealth or a response to its absence.

Making public images is performing. It isn’t inherently negative nor positive. Public image is, to some degree, translatable to profit, despite not being monetary initially. A slight tangent—architect Bernard Schumi describes as the triangulation of concept, content, and context. He emphasized that while this triangulation isn’t a prerequisite for “good” architecture, the decisions to downplay or upsell certain aspects of it must be strategic. I think that, as much as we hope for a world where we can create art free from all these burdens, defining what constitutes art and culture is strategic. I don’t believe those who claim to represent “the arts and cultural sector” are defining it with the vision to end the constant need to justify being deserving of a generous gift. Operating under a charity framework as an arts organization is strategic, and it pays handsomely—but in the long run it undercuts the value and labour that might otherwise be monetized more lucratively (if art’s “artness” were less visible, artfully hidden).

Much of our creative ecosystem is built on a moral disposition that art should be supported because of its social value. Being good at performing poverty as a show of resilience. Like many not-for-profits and charitable organizations, the phrase “stretching every dollar” is a testament to good management of funder dollars. The reality that 50 cents of every dollar raised goes to administration is treated as a scandal. But who pays for the work being done? There needs to be a moment when we stop believing that being able to do more with less money is the foundation of our lives. We tell ourselves stories about losing resources, spaces, affordable access—but if a story is repeated enough times, even if it isn’t entirely true, we start to live it. Scarcity is one of them: in the arts and cultural sector, and in our lives.

At Goblin Market events, many items offered are simply remnants of impulse purchases: contents from blind boxes, thoughtlessly produced costume jewelry, and memorabilia from another lifetime. It resembles the donation bin at thrift stores—with a few gems, but much of it is secondhand guilt. Many of us do see value in these objects: too good to throw away, yet not cherished enough to keep. These objects are designed for ephemerality—necklaces that tarnish, novelty items whose appeal fades once the mystery is gone. We buy them for a fleeting feeling of joy, belonging, and identity alignment that comes from possession of these objects, even though these objects don’t last. We often blame them for being cheaply made, but they are made precisely as intended—a quick-fix experience to our own perpetual dread. Yet we still argue: is it worthwhile to pay generously for an experience that yields no lasting “thing”? Why is paying for drinks at a show or buying merch from an artist more justifiable than paying generously for the show itself? Scarcity doesn’t only rob us of resources—it demands we constantly justify whether something deserves our time, money, attention, care—every form of “resource.”

Generosity and breaking out of scarcity’s chokehold go together.

Scarcity brings far more than just infighting and jealousy. Scarcity carves a deep trench of habitually undervaluing everything.  It is a death loop of choosing discounted experiences for their low cost, only to complain about their low quality. Next time around, after careful evaluation of the pros and cons, the choice remains the discounted experience as a cheaper, logical, and justifiable option in this economy, despite being able to afford the price materially. This is telling in the number of times someone from a much better-funded position (a few zeros out) reaches out with an invitation, only to close with “Can you do this at a discount? Can you recommend someone who does the same thing you do, but at a lower cost? We are experiencing funding cuts. We are a not-for-profit.”

Well. Guess what? 

:)

Awkward.

Scarcity isn’t just being short on resources. People living under a massive shortage of resources often give quite generously to others—not for altruistic reasons nor as a romanticized gesture against capitalism. When money is not a reliable store of resources or safety, having trust in other humans and vice versa becomes an effective cache. In many cultures, money serves as a proxy for trust, and business is fundamentally an exchange of trust. This also means sometimes monetary exchange isn’t the only way to be “in business” when the risk is shared and the trust is reciprocated. Scarcity creates a compulsion to evaluate everything tightly on a rubric, maximizing and optimizing until no better justification for an action can be found. Risk is not shared. It is contained and then transferred with a bounty attached to it. It corrodes trust because pretending or performing an image to meet the criteria of these justifications is far easier than maintaining trust.

The arts funding system thrive on this logic—I asked ChatGPT for a sick joke about the arts, to which the prompt returns: “If an artist receives $500 to create a 200-hour community art project while a consultant is paid $5,000 to evaluate it, how many hours must the artist work before realizing their hourly wage is less than minimum wage?”

It lands because the justification for the importance of the arts is often, if not always, valued more than the art itself. Rounds and rounds of evaluation and assessment to ensure the money goes to the “right” artists. The disparity lies between people who decide the value and impact of the art and those who make the art. While artists complain about unfair compensation (yet can't resist the $500, a community project opportunity, and a platform to show the work), the $5000 evaluation leads to significantly larger gains down the line for the parties evaluating and distributing the funds—what does this mean?

The watertight evaluation traces itself back to a desire for certainty and quick evacuation from liability. What matters is not the work, but the story told about the work. The artist demonstrates resilience under scarcity by doing more with less, with the bonus of it being a community project. In contrast, the other side exhibits certainty—certainty that a story can be crafted from “the power of the arts bringing people together.”

We often criticize how corporations and institutions control stories through surveillance and censorship. Yet we, too, craft our images strategically to meet criteria for reward. We scoff at “AI-written grants,” but when applications are judged less on art than on one’s ability to manipulate pages upon pages of 350-word input fields asking the same questions over and over again, why shouldn’t LLMs take over? The sector prides itself on creativity and risk-taking, yet operates with mechanical predictability, rewarding those most skilled at compliance and obedience.

The most delightful thing about living with a cat is knowing that showing belly and biting the hand aren’t mutually exclusive. Ursula K. Le Guin lovingly compares cats to anarchists, aside from the fact that they are too small—easily picked up and moved by a human against their will. Also, thumbs, they don’t have opposable thumbs to open cans of wet food. They will exhaust all the possible annoyances until the human budges to get to the contents of the can. Upon their victory, the belly. But don’t be fooled. An attempt to touch the belly (very cute) returns a bite. 

I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with being in the arts, but I think having fangs to bite makes showing the vulnerable belly a much better leverage in this game we play.

Oh. This one also helps: being persistently mischievous and simultaneously ridiculously cute makes even the fangs and the bites irresistible.

As always, something to keep your minds occupied elsewhere: