Waging Culture –Canadian Visual Artists In Focus

CCA Bul­letin 13/09

April 20, 2009

 

Just the Facts

Michael Miranda and his col­leagues at the York Uni­ver­sity Art Gallery had had enough. Fol­low­ing the pub­lic dis­cus­sion of arts fund­ing dur­ing the last fed­eral elec­tion, the lack of cred­i­ble data on the state of the visual arts had to be addressed.

No com­pre­hen­sive data on the socio-economic state of visual artists had been pro­duced since the 1993 Cana­dian Cul­tural Labour Force Sur­vey. Intent on redress­ing this lacuna, Michael embarked on an ambi­tious study to unearth fresh data on the Cana­dian visual arts sector.

The study presents a wide range of infor­ma­tion about the visual artist in Canada, from home own­er­ship to spousal sup­port and time allo­ca­tion. It presents the most com­pre­hen­sive exam­i­na­tion of how visual artists in Canada are far­ing, where they live, where they were born and lan­guages spoken.

The study should help debunk those who believe that artists sub­sist solely on gov­ern­ment hand-outs. Indeed, the evi­dence in Wag­ing Cul­ture sug­gests that visual artists pur­sue sev­eral forms of income gen­er­a­tion simul­ta­ne­ously. The image of cham­pagne swill­ing artists at swanky galas should be replaced with the gritty real­ity of work­ing sev­eral jobs and pur­su­ing an artis­tic prac­tice at the same time.

Wag­ing Cul­ture is a major sur­vey of Cana­dian visual artists which pro­vides a very com­plete por­trait of their life. Some of what the authors found is not sur­pris­ing to those of us who have been work­ing in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor, namely:

Tell Me More

Wag­ing Cul­ture used the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts def­i­n­i­tion of a pro­fes­sional artist which reads as,

“some­one who has spe­cial­ized train­ing in the field (not nec­es­sar­ily in aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions), who is rec­og­nized as such by her or his peers (artists work­ing in the same artis­tic tra­di­tion) and who has a his­tory of pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion or publication.”

The data for the Wag­ing Cul­ture study was col­lected online, using Respon­dent Dri­ven Sam­pling, from July through Decem­ber of 2008 and cov­ers the 2007 cal­en­dar year. Through this method­ol­ogy poten­tial par­tic­i­pants referred the names of other pro­fes­sional artists and the pat­tern repli­cated itself as the sur­vey pro­gressed. Demo­graphic infor­ma­tion is accu­rate within ±3.96%, 19 times out of 20. Finan­cial infor­ma­tion is accu­rate within ±5.83%, 19 times out of 20.

It would seem that the neg­a­tive com­ments about fund­ing of the arts at the time of sur­vey stim­u­lated a healthy response rate to the sur­vey. For the first phase of the study over 3,700 invi­ta­tions to par­tic­i­pate were sent result­ing in an over all response rate of 37%. The sec­ond half of the study gen­er­ated a net response rate of 46%.

The CCA would like to con­grat­u­late Michael Miranda and his col­leagues at the York Uni­ver­sity Art Gallery for their ded­i­ca­tion and their clear deter­mi­na­tion that cul­tural pol­icy should not be devel­oped in a vac­uum. This study pro­vides impor­tant insights into the chal­lenges and achieve­ments of Canada’s visual artists.

The full text of Wag­ing Cul­ture is avail­able dig­i­tally from the York Uni­ver­sity Art Gallery by fol­low­ing this link.