In september 2008, one of Canada’s Prime minister’s aides tossed out the flippant remark that if artists are not successful (asking for grants, tsk-tsk!) it is because they are amateurs, “Sunday artists”. This view is congruent with the “law of the jungle” attitude, let the masses struggle without help so that a few chosen rise above all others.*
Later, while ordering new cuts to the culture budget, our Prime Minister made a remark about spoiled artists parading at gala, viewed by the “ordinary citizens”.
**
As an artist working seven days a week, and earning less that the minimum wage, I felt deeply shocked by my First Minister’s insensitivity. To the eyes of the leading politician in my country, I am not a citizen, but a “parasite”.
Unless, of course, I achieve so much fame and riches that it ensures my social validation.
So, I drew this autoportrait, reminiscent of all the months I lived on canned foods.
Autoportrait as a Sunday artist
As a science-fiction writer, my social responsibility is to see far, to think ahead and find creative solutions to the many challenges that lay in the future, as we will face the consequences of our present choices. And introducing children to the many flavors of the literary ice cream, encouraging them to read, to learn and to persevere, is my ever ongoing task.
No, Prime Minister, I am NOT a parasite!
Endnotes
*The few successeful stars mask the majority of the artist population, most of them work in another field to live. And even those rare pearls did, at the beginning of their career, benefit from government grants.
**The “spoiled artist” was protesting against the censure.
Later, an Action démocratique du Quebec organizer running as the Conservative candidate in Quebec City’s downtown Québec riding, declared in the city’s Le Soleil newspaper: “Artists are spoiled rotten”. Of course, the public outcry convinced her to amend her words, but the gist of the message stays like a bad aftertaste: artists are social parasites.
Tenors of the “Conservative” party repeted many variations of this theme, fostering a false debate opposing “ordinary citizens” and “spoiled artists”, while cutting the culture budget and CBC’s financing, in places that amount to a censure aimed at artists who do not march along the right tune.
(With the current economic crisis, government hands retrieved billions from their deep pockets to help the car industry. But the Federal government refused to give the CBC bridge financing to get it through the coming fiscal year of 2009, forcing them to cut their programming…)
