68. What can philanthropists teach artists about giving?

Unpublished
July 17, 1998.

Re: Ontario arts funding under fire, July 16, 1998. The recent reported remarks made by the OAC’s Hal Jackman and Gwenlyn Setterfield demonstrate once again that despite their independent status and worth, arts councils are increasingly over-eager to quell the fevers of their political masters.
Who is manufacturing an arts crisis that can only be solved by expertise from business, administration and philanthropy ? What recent histories of artistic cultural building are being displaced in the process? Though the Government of Ontario and Hal Jackman clearly have not given it much thought, changes to arts council funding juries should pass the following tests: Do such changes improve the process for those who qualify as applicants? Do they improve the quality of public representation and expertise in decision-making or just give a bigger say to a self-serving management élite who become less rather more accountable? In the immediate past it has been artists — not politicians, conservative pundits or arts bureaucrats — who have forced issues of accountability, accessibility and a wider public representation within arts councils.
Though rarely seen in conversation with Robert Scully on TV, artists and cultural producers nonetheless have adapted fully-functional administrative and entrepreunarial skills within the given environment. Even within the same sector, arts management expertise is not mechanically interchangeable. Different expectations of audience and community, profit and profile necessitate different organizational strategies. The modus operandi of a Garth Drabinsky is not exportable to a Buddies in Bad Times theatre company any more than the client development of a commercial dealer like Olga Korper has much relevance for an artist-run centre like A Space.
What can philanthropists teach artists about giving? As effective citizen-entrepreneurs, artists already re-invest their income back into their own businesses (i.e. their own work) with a single-mindedness that would make even Conrad Black blush. Since the early seventies artist communities have created jobs and a cultural environment that has made it possible for all manner of non-related businesses to thrive. Who knew about urban regentrification before artists made loft-renovations while working in and helping identify those ‘trendy’ bars, clubs, and cafés as places to inhabit? Immigrant communities and small businesses have helped create art scenes across the country; corporate accountants, bankers and the art-loving residents of the Rosedale communities have not.
Despite their flaws and obvious limitations, the arts councils developed in Canada have been the “envy of the world” precisely because artists (who are the primary subsidizers of artistic cultures) and arts professionals have played a substantial role in ensuring that arts councils adhere to their public mandates of fostering the study, enjoyment and production of works in the arts. Though some museum and larger performing arts company managements have wanted a different interpretation, the priority has been to support works produced by living artists including writings by newspaper journalists that appear in commercial Canadian art magazines.
Currently there are four board vacancies at the OAC. In normal times two of these positions should go to artists and two to those who represent social constituencies not already over-represented. But having already weighted the OAC board with arts administrators, management consultants and the ‘dissident’ Linda Frum, Minister Isobel Bassett should immediately call four bullpit artists to serve on the board of the OAC to make sure that the finger-licking foxes don’t completely empty the chicken coop.