Completely in solidarity with the concerns raised by the entire cultural community, our organizations are concerned about the lack of funding for arts and culture in the 2024-2025 Quebec budget. This lack of substantial funds has a resounding effect on all artists, artisans, cultural workers in our sectors, and on the very survival of the organizations that support them.
Poor relations in the cultural sector, the visual arts, digital arts, interdisciplinary arts, museology and crafts collectively receive 4.3% of the total funding granted by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Société de développement cultural businesses, all sectors combined. Over the years, there has been a growing gap in financial support for artists, collectives and organizations in our sector, even though most activities are accessible free of charge to all citizens, which limits the development capacity of the organizations, for the benefit of the efforts made and necessary for the accessibility and development of audiences.
Already weakened by the oft-mentioned pandemic, by the lack of visibility of artists and their works, and by the flagrant absence of visual, digital, interdisciplinary arts, museology and crafts in the media space, our ecosystem struggles to improve and offer decent working conditions to artists and the organizations that distribute and support them. This situation remains one of the most precarious in the entire cultural sector.
However, our sectors have one of the most important and best represented cultural, economic and social contributions throughout Quebec. They facilitate creative intelligence and the diversity of artistic practices as well as the local economy, tourism and job creation. And, like the entire cultural community, they stimulate pride and a feeling of belonging to Quebec society.
Its main characteristic is an ecosystem articulated in a short chain of economic value creation. In visual, digital, interdisciplinary arts and fine crafts, most of the time, the same people fulfill all the functions in the chain. Artists and artisans are both creators who conceptualize and make, producers and presenters who themselves exhibit and sell a large part of their production.
And it is also they who carry out the management and training functions, which in a long chain are generally occupied by cultural workers: teaching, dissemination, mediation, management, sales, etc. As a result, there are relatively few support organizations in our sector, which has a direct impact on the economy of the field.
Faced with these specific considerations, our organizations support the collective demands of the cultural sector, and request a significant increase in the budgets of Culture in Quebec, creator of value and collective identity. They also expect economic support more adapted to the realities experienced by the visual arts, digital arts, interdisciplinary arts, crafts and museology sectors.