beware of greeks bearing gifts

One of the biggest problems with the present structure is that it tends to leave out individual artists who aren't established within a clique or a group. A lot of artists/writers/creators tend to work on their own, they need that time to themselves to think/work things through. Groups tend to weld a little more power and being in a group is a stronger structure for an artist, but not always possible. It is often the nature of the work and/or the personality of the artist that sets the artist apart. We can't all schmooze our way to "success".

Once the group is established, usually the funding is as well, as long as those applications go in with the attendant bible of rhetoric. I use the word, usually, because funding for groups who produced social and environmental justice media were eliminated when Tom Sherman came in as head of arts and media and changed the name to Media Arts. It was during a period when there were a lot of cutbacks. For students of history, does any of this sound familiar?

but what do we actually get for our money?

We get great value from theatre, dance, writing and music, it's the media arts that turned into coal, video art being the most corrupted. As one writer girlfriend put it, "art about art about artists........" there was more but it would be rude, but take for instance this example she gave: a group of mean nasty people find the dead body of a homeless person in the alley next to their media centre where they all have paid jobs, they then proceed to make a video financed by the Canada Council, of a group of BEAUTIFUL, mean nasty people who find a dead body in the alley murder mystery.

I think the above is self explanatory in a "what's wrong with this picture" sort of way.

You can't expect people to comment in this forum, without destroying their careers, so I'll try to report the gist of others opinions without including the expletives.

"success stories" by the canada council

so who are all the rest of us, "failure stories"? I see that the CC has beefed up its site somewhat since my original "bite the hand" posting, with a fine display of their "success stories". What we need now is an academic, who gets paid for this sort of thing, to dig into the archives and give us the total amounts these artists have been funded over the years to see who really is a "success story".

The site has also brought the media arts grants awards up to date, not so yet with the rest. We still don't have listings of past and present juries and their backgrounds or backgrounds of artists who have no search results.

I don't know how it has been for all of us failures, for myself, it was fortunate that my focus moved to the environment and the subject of garbage. And as this blog began as a result of the non funding of eco art to illustrate the destructive results of any incineration project, I will elucidate my "failure" as an artist. For two years (amongst the 6 I spent fighting for waste reduction in the GVRD) I was fighting the refuse derived fuel plant planned for the Strathcona neighbourhood by the engineers of Vancouver and the GVRD. They had already colluded to install the stinking, pollluting so called "waste to energy" garbage incinerator in Burnaby and now they wanted to squeeze unsorted garbage from North and West Vancouver in addition to our own, into toxic fuel pellets for burning in some other unfortunate community. If you think the Downtown Eastside is bad now can you imagine what it would be like with some facility like that next to the community gardens and garbage trucks gunning down into this area from all directions.

in the beginning...

it was during the Trudeau era, lots of money was being spent on social initiatives and we thought it was a great idea to receive money from the government to support art, but it wasn't until a few years later that the effect of this government funding on the arts community started to become really apparent. I mean, how can you, as an artist, criticize government policies with your mouth stuffed with greasy chicken. The government knew this when it started to fund experimental / social / media art. Who is going to agitate against government policies when that's what pays the bills every month. This should be obvious to everyone.

buy the complicity of artists? no problem

and then find out that you don't get the money anyway

…...Promises were made without the money in place. And I think that when the money wasn't in place and wasn't forthcoming, there was a total lack of communication with the arts community at large.” - David Pay, artistic director of the new Music on Main series
......So are the promises being lived up to in terms of four years of performance? Absolutely not.… - Heather Redfern, executive director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre
.......I was talking to a colleague the other day about the fact the Cultural Olympiad is not starting till 2008 and it was promised to start in 2006. So that's very telling right there. Another concern is that if you are part of the Olympics and you have sponsorships for your piece of work or your company, you can't actually acknowledge them because your company or show sponsors cannot be associated with the Olympics. Only the Olympic sponsors can be. So where does that leave us? What, do we blow off our show sponsors? It just seems completely not thought through. And with the [provincial] Liberal budget, I'm not sure where the money's going to come from to include local arts in their [the Olympics] programming, - Diane Brown, artistic director and cofounder of Ruby Slippers Theatre
By Brian Lynch and Janet Smith Publish Date: March 1, 2007, Georgia Straight

And only two years earlier...

So, in this context, arts is a $96-million-plus deal at the 2010 Olympics. Most of that money is currently administered by Taylor, who was director of the City of Vancouver's Office of Cultural Affairs for 16 years. He and colleague Marti Kulich (ceremonies expert) are the only two VANOC staffers dedicated to arts and culture, out of a total staff of about 90.
Taylor and Kulich are a small team with a big job. There are no supporting committees or advisory groups yet. While the VANOC-based arts initiatives are still on their marks, the starting pistol has already fired for other Olympic arts initiatives.
For example, the dense-and- confusing new arts funding. It comes in six pots.
Pot of money No. 1 is in the hands of VANOC, and is worth $96 million. That's the money for the four-year Cultural Olympiad, the Torino Olympics closing ceremonies, education and youth programs, the torch relay, and the 2010 opening and closing ceremonies.
Pot of money No. 2 is distributed through the new nonprofit ArtsNow. This organization, which is completely separate from VANOC, must distribute $12 million before July 2007. The mandate: to increase the capacity of B.C. arts organizations so they can participate fully in the Olympics.
Pot of money No. 3 is the Spirit of BC Arts Fund, $20 million administered by the B.C. Arts Council. Its mandate also includes capacity-building and the commissioning of new works.
Three other pots of money are not formally Olympics-related, but coincidentally arrived just in time for the event: the B.C. government's $25-million gift to the Vancouver Foundation; the additional $3 million per year to the B.C. Arts Council; plus the $6 million in increases to Vancouver's Office of Cultural Affairs.
In spite of flashy new money and human resources, at least one arts advocate is watching closely. "At past events, the danger is that the money gets diverted from cultural programming to sport [as budgets run over]," Heather Redfern, executive director of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, told the Straight. "We will be vigilant in making sure that doesn't happen."
Art has a history of getting steamrollered by sport at the Olympics, as Anne Popma points out in her excellent research piece, "Potential Impact of the 2010 Olympic Games on Local Arts and Culture in the Sea-to-Sky Corridor: Lessons Learned From Previous Host Communities". In Sydney, for example, the arts budget at the 2000 games was reduced from $51 million to $21 million.
(Popma's 58-page report, which was commissioned by the Whistler Arts Council, should be required reading for any artist or arts organization hoping to capitalize on, resist, or spoof the 2010 games. It's available at www.whistlerartscouncil.com/updates/pdf/research.pdf.)
(The above pdf seems to be no longer available.)

However, the arts at the 2010 Olympics might be in trouble if their support depends on a strong arts passion among members of VANOC. Oddly, not one of the 20 members on the committee is primarily an arts person, according to the biographies they submitted to Vancouver2010 .com. ........Arts planning for the 2010 Olympics is just a sketch right now. But with more than $120 million in new arts funding to be spent in the next five years, the hurricane is poised to hit our province hard.

Olympic arts plan sketchy, Arts By Pieta Woolley
Publish Date: May 19, 2005, Georgia Straight

who are you?

I'm not lazy, I have chronic fatigue and a school of life education, which makes me tired, of all the rhetoric, which sometimes allows bad art to be good and vice versa, so I compensate, by trying to focus on the most critical things affecting our planet, ie: the human psyche and its ensuing compulsive greed. In this I find a great source of inspiration, in both ignoring it and exploring it.