Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I would like to thank the committee members for inviting us to appear today.
My presentation will be mainly in English, with a few short paragraphs in French. I work for a national association whose members are mainly in Canada. So I work a lot in English, but I do everything in both official languages on a daily basis.
In response to the committee's mandate, the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, hereafter referred to as ARCA and represented by myself and Jason Saint-Laurent, is thankful to appear before you to address remuneration models through the unique perspective of artist-run centres, also known as ARCs—an infrastructure of 180 organizations located across Canada. ARCs provide multiple access points to the arts for both art professionals and the public.
Artist-run centres are non-profit organizations governed by artists. ARCs support the production and public presentation of new and innovative practices and are committed to paying artists the recommended minimum CARFAC fees of $1,996 per exhibition lasting four weeks on average. In 2015-16, artist-run centres presented the work of over 4,000 Canadians—Canadian artists, I should say, but they are also Canadians—across the country in more than 900 exhibitions attended by some 1.5 million audience members.
A statistical study conducted in 2010 by the Observatoire de la culture et des communications of the Institut de la statistique du Québec on a sample of professional visual artists found that only one-third of artists had received royalties, for a median annual amount of about $890. Although this source of income is important for artists, it is far from providing a living.
It is impossible to establish with certainty the amount of exhibition royalties paid by artist-run centres to artists with the current Canadian Arts Data—also known as CADAC—as there is no clear differentiation between fees and royalties in financial reporting.
Because royalties represent such a small proportion of revenues, salaries and honoraria are an important source of income for artists. Artist-run centres actively work toward providing adequate pay for curatorial and administrative staff, half of whom are also practising artists. This labour force plays a key role in integrating new generations of artists and cultural workers by bridging the gap between higher education training, professional artistic practice and cultural management.
In 2015-16, only 77 artist-run centres of the 180 received core funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, representing less than half of our members. With total revenues of over $21 million, the median annual operating budget of these 77 centres was less than $250,000. Approximately $5.5 million of this revenue was paid in salaries and professional fees, representing over half of total artistic expenses. The remaining portion was dedicated to production costs, special projects, publications, professional development, outreach and education. Only 35% of the overall workforce positions were full-time, with a decrease of 2.7% since 2010, likely due to the growing freelance and part-time workforce, for which we only have anecdotal data.
Organizations systematically operate with fewer paid staff than what is needed.
Artist-run culture draws from an exceptional, highly specialized labour force. Designers, copy editors, translators, technicians—often artists themselves—are experts in the production of programming. Exhibiting artists are encouraged to give public talks and facilitate workshops along with their exhibitions. This labour, whether related to production or exhibition, provides additional revenues in the form of honoraria. Payment of these honoraria, however, can vary considerably according to organizational budgets.
I have a proposal. The current data, despite its gaps, suggests that current copyright-based remuneration falls short in providing artists with a living wage. Artist-run centres are currently providing additional sources of artistic income, on shoestring budgets.
In light of the above presentation, we ask the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to consider recommending the following to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.
One, strike a partnership between the Department of Canadian Heritage and Statistics Canada to develop and fund new statistical tools to better gauge today's complex visual arts sector according to key indicators and monitor the evolution of the socio-economic conditions of artists and cultural workers over time with greater granularity than the Culture Satellite Account can currently provide.
Two, before developing programs for the cultural hubs infrastructure—I read it this morning on the bus and it's fantastic, actually; thank you for that work—examine the current challenges faced by the existing Canadian artist-run network, representing a cross-section of artists, curators and managers who have been making Canadian art happen locally, nationally and internationally for over 40 years.
In closing, ARCA is grateful to members of Parliament for their part in approving the doubling of the Canada Council for the Arts budget. In the first round of core funding results since the increase in 2017-18, artist-run centres received an overall increase of 30%. More increases are expected after this year's second round of applications.
Thank you.