Title: The Audacity of Relevance: Critical Conversations on the Future of Arts and Culture
Author: Alex Sarian
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: ECW Press
Pages: 196
Title: The Starving Artist Myth: Bust the Stereotype and Find Success in Creative Careers
Author: Mark J. Jones
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Pages: 299
“If you love the arts as much as I do, you’ve probably noticed that things have not been OK recently.”
So goes the first page of The Audacity of Relevance: Critical Conversations on the Future of Arts and Culture, the new book by Alex Sarian, chief executive of Calgary’s Arts Commons complex. For some of his colleagues in the arts world, things are much worse than just not okay. Canada’s cultural life is in a period of financial peril: Performing-arts attendance is down; philanthropic and sponsorship dollars are going elsewhere; and most major grant-giving bodies across the country are getting stagnant funding, at best, from their governments after many months of high inflation.
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It’s bad out there. Artists are facing higher costs of living and arts organizations are making hard decisions. Insolvencies, restructurings and lower-budget seasons abound. Don’t even ask about rent. Even the mighty Stratford Festival, which pulled off a surplus in 2023, has been trimming expenses this year to reckon with its higher costs. It’s enough to make a cynic out of everyone in the arts sector.
Yet in the face of all this, some Canadian arts leaders remain counterintuitively optimistic. Sarian is one of them, and he’s making his case with The Audacity of Relevance, published Oct. 1, which insists that arts organizations can escape financial peril by connecting more closely with their communities.
That book comes on the heels of The Starving Artist Myth, released in August by Mark J. Jones, the dean of Sheridan College’s renowned faculty of animation, arts and design. Jones’s attention is on artists themselves – who, he believes, don’t need to suffer financially for their art, even in such a rough economic climate.
Though COVID-19 lockdowns pummelled the arts world’s finances, Sarian argues that public-health closings are not solely responsible for the struggles that so many theatre, dance, music, visual-arts and other arts institutions face. Instead, the pandemic and subsequent inflation revealed that audiences are “less and less persuaded that our in-person programming is a desirable option for their discretionary spending and leisure hours.”
Rather than return from the pandemic with compelling new work to entice audiences new and old, Sarian contends that many arts organizations immediately went back to status-quo programming at the expense of their relevance. To counter this, their leaders need to meet their audiences where they are – not just with their works, but with their hiring – and to treat art as a social phenomenon, not simply a product.
At their best, arts organizations act as extensions of their communities, not arbiters of taste or status. Sarian gets that. He brings a wealth of experience to the book – after six years at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, he’s marshalled millions of dollars toward transforming Arts Commons into what he and his funders hope will be a centrepiece of the Calgary community.
Jones’s The Starving Artist Myth turns its optimism to the individual, reaching out as an olive branch to budding artists who might be fearful of today’s job market. The book is part career guide, part balm for artists’ families, part history of its titular myth. Creative work is everywhere, Jones points out, from the designs printed on coffee cups to the ever-evolving digital world. By taking a broad view of “creative cluster” jobs – whose economic output, Jones notes, has recently grown faster than the rest of the economy – he makes a convincing case that creative, stable work can exist for artists in Canada. With some caveats.
Like Sarian’s arguments, much of Jones’s advice involves a certain amount of ego death. Artists, he says, “are not that special.” In-person group experiences in other realms, such as sports, command massive profits. No matter one’s talent, we live in what many artists no doubt consider a capitalist hellscape – which means plying one’s talent in a market. Once again, the spectre of relevance rears its head – what do people want? And in that context, can commercial creative work still be spirit-fulfilling?
It depends on the artist, and, while Jones doesn’t spend too many pages litigating the nineties-esque notion of “selling out,” he does point out that to hack it these days, artists need to be willing and able to find audiences and promote their work.
Both books have limitations in the scope of their pragmatism. The Starving Artist Myth acknowledges that generative artificial-intelligence systems have the potential to replace human creative work, but it appears to have gone to print before those dire consequences began manifesting in layoffs, particularly in the video game and animation industries.
Some of Sarian’s guidance comes across as more cost-prohibitive than smaller, community-centric organizations might be able to afford. His approach to philanthropy is generally a smart one: Tell a good story and bring the community into it. But many arts organizations struggle to recruit the fundraising muscle that can execute this kind of vision – including Arts Commons’s own tenant One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre. Earlier this year, I spoke with its producer Oliver Armstrong; full-time, high-calibre fundraisers, he told me, are something they just can’t afford.
These setbacks, however, might accidentally reinforce their books’ central theses. Just as there is no one universal experience of a piece of art, there is no one universal experience of surviving today’s arts economy. The point is that if you pay closer attention to the world around you, you might find new ways to live.
Josh O’Kane is the author of two non-fiction books, including Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy. He covers the business of arts and culture for The Globe and Mail.
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