"I n a certain sense, I have been an employee of the Canadian government for the roughly eighteen months during which I wrote my book, How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists. Not in the sense of having job security or benefits or a pension contribution or a direct supervisor or a specific place to be or a title,"
"Though it's certainly not the case in terms of raw dollar amounts-not even the actual bureaucrats and administrators who shepherd these programs are pulling in hundreds of millions in compensation and bonuses, let alone stock options-in terms of actual number and geographic distribution of artists supported by it, government money is the current reigning world champion of keeping artists from literally starving."
"This is without getting cute with our borders: I am not counting novelists pulling pogey as a writer's retreat or the trickling implications of who exactly is paying for a tenured fine arts professor's salary when you get right down to it. In terms of direct, purposeful transfer, arts funding is propping up an egregious amount of artistic activity. And the vast majority of that funding comes in the form of grants."
A particular eighteen-month creative project relied primarily on Canadian government grants for income. Government arts funding serves as the dominant direct transfer preventing many artists from literal destitution across broad geographic areas. These public funds, distributed via arts councils, ministries of culture, and tax incentives for charitable giving, underwrite wide swaths of artistic activity. Although individual compensation is not comparable to large private-sector payouts, grants sustain non-household-name artists and enable ongoing practices. Indirect support also accrues through publicly funded academic and institutional positions, but direct grant-making constitutes the core mechanism for sustaining freelance and emerging artists.
Read at The Walrus
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