For several years, successive governments have rightly injected significant sums into the field of culture in order to ensure its development and sustainability. However, by consulting several striking statistical data, it becomes obvious that something is not right in the way money percolates, from the hand of the State to the creators.
The reality is that despite a 25% increase in cultural budgets in recent years, the average salary of artists has not changed significantly in 30 years. Today it is $20,787, or $4,500 less than a minimum wage worker. If we exclude the 1% of artists who earn $200,000 or more, we plummet to an average income of $16,911… $15,000 below the poverty line… Our creators continue to get poorer and struggle more and more to be able to practice their profession with dignity.
A question then becomes pressing and inevitable:
So what is the path that public funding, so precious and vital for our culture, follows, from the hand of the State, via producers and broadcasters, to the creators to whom the public owes the works it look, read or hear?
The answer to this very simple question is ambiguous and complex which, we believe, has no reason to be. It is imperative to understand the nuts and bolts of awarding grants and managing budgets. Who says public treasure means accountability.
We do not doubt the good faith of most stakeholders in the cultural sector.
But it is clear that for some of them, our governments’ funding of culture seems to become a lucrative windfall to the detriment of the well-being of too many artists without whom they could not exist.
Unanswered questions
Here are a few crucial questions, among many others, which shine the spotlight on what look like contradictions, or even appearances of conflicts of interest:
– How can production companies, which survive almost entirely on public money, become so lucrative that duly listed consortia buy them?
– How are our main granting institutions governed (SODEC, CALQ, Telefilm, Musicaction, etc.) whose administrators, often producers, can occupy several simultaneous seats on the different boards of directors?
– How can production companies that request subsidies find themselves sitting on the boards of institutions that grant them these same subsidies?
– Why are certain companies systematically granted, year after year, recurring discretionary envelopes, thus reducing the share allocated to small companies which struggle to obtain financing? In short, how is it that public money is monopolized by a handful of cultural companies, when a greater diversity of companies could flourish and propose innovative projects with the same money?
– Why is it so difficult to trace the route that public money follows in culture?
Given these questions which remain unanswered, it is not surprising that creators feel more and more cheated and powerless. To such an extent that a serious crisis of confidence in institutions is emerging in the artistic community. Everyone would benefit from more transparency.
This is without taking into account the other important problems that the cultural sector must face without delay.
Let’s think of the GAFAM who in just a few years have come to destroy the income of artists by shamelessly using their works or their performances without paying (or very little) royalties.
The example of music is glaring. A company like Spotify pays virtually nothing to artists whose works can be played hundreds of thousands or even millions of times on its platform. However, the same company requires a very lucrative subscription to allow us to listen to these same works.
Add to all this the dazzling emergence of artificial intelligence which “learns” by observing, listening and copying the works, voices and movements of artists in the flesh with the aim of replacing them… and we have the final ingredient to concoct a fantastic catastrophe that will only seriously weaken our culture in the long term.
Do we need more arguments to convince our governments to invite all those involved in the cultural sector to general meetings? Whether in literature, theater, dance, visual arts, music, audiovisual, a great collective questioning is necessary in order to reflect on the future of our rich cultural ecosystem, to find solutions to the pitfalls which await it, to free the speech and restore a little dignity to the artists who constitute its raw foundation.
It is a question of identity, safeguarding and sustainability.
Culture is an essential good.
Consult the list of signatories
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