Tories Still Don’t Want Artists’ Votes
This weekend, it was announced that Telefilm’s $14.5m new media fund has been the latest to have its support pulled as a result of the Tories’ “strategic review” of “all departments”.
Also this weekend, I listened to the podcast of Q from Friday, and was surprised (and then not so surprised) by the list of criteria John Abbott provided as reasons for funding to be cut.
- reached their objectives
- high administrative cost
- poor performance
- did not have satisfactory results
These are slightly different (and the last one more suspect) than the ones provided at the Heritage committee meeting:
- met their objectives
- similar programs were providing similar services
- the program had high operating costs
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Filed under : arts administration
By Julianna Yau
On September 1, 2008
At 6:27 pm
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By Julianna Yau
On September 1, 2008
At 6:27 pm
Comments :
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The funding cuts are crazy. A close friend of mine won a $250,000 new media grant a few years back, but it barely covered his costs. He made probably the best short video ever made in Canada, but because there’s no distribution for shorts, no one ever saw it outside of a couple of film festivals. Last year, he could only get $120,000. Now, nothing. He’s talking about going to the States. We have to pay for our artists the same way we pay for our doctors — maybe even more so. You can privatize medicine, but you really can’t privatize fringe arts which just don’t have the audience to generate enough revenue. If we can’t pay our artists in line with lawyers and doctors and MBAs, then we’ll create a society where no one wants to be artists any more.
The sad thing is that I’m hearing more and more non-artists/non-creators tell me that a true artist would keep doing what they do even if they can’t make any money from it. Makes me a little angry and a little sick at the same time.