Artist in Canada

It’s funny business being an artist in Canada. If you doubt, just ask any artist how many different things they have to do to make a living.

Perhaps acting, music, painting, and other performance mediums are the only career paths where you can train for a lifetime and still make less in a year than someone working full-time for minimum wage. In addition to making very little, musicians suffer the injustice of being undervalued in Canadian society.

Imagine training for hours a day, taking a degree, and then coming out of school with no prospects for work. You must do you art on the side so that you can survive. Then, potentially, several years (or more) down the road, you have enough experience that you can quit your day job and do only your profession, and you still make less than $600 a week.
The busiest and best musician in town can have no money in the bank, and be unknown to the general public. Think for a moment of the Canadian performers that you are familiar with. Who in ballet, contemporary dance, painting, mixed media, film-making, acting, writing, rock music, jazz, world music can you name? Who is Toronto’s Poet Laureate? For every one person that you can name, there are 1000 others also trying to make it in the arts business.

Musicians become known to the public through making recordings and playing free festivals and putting music out through the internet. Once we have interested you then we hope you’ll buy our records and pay ticket prices to come and see us. Each record costs us a significant amount of money to make, upwards of $15,000 and often double that, just for a basic record. We apply for help from arts councils but they are very selective and many musicians do not get help. Making a record is daunting financially when you are not making extra dollars and you have to feed your family.

The art that we make is special because it costs us so much to make it.
Who brings tourists to our cities? Artists, of course. As much as we despise dirty streets, we don’t travel to a city to see how clean it is. We travel to cities to feel the vibe, and to move with the energy in the streets. We go for shopping and concerts, shows and festivals. Designers, musicians, poets, artists, dancers, film-makers and performance artists are the heart of our cities. We need people like you to come to hear and see shows, visit galleries, find out who are the designers in the city and buy their clothes, furniture and other wares.

Artists coming from all countries on the planet, congregating in Toronto and making art that comes from integrated living is what sets Canada apart from every other country on earth.

--
(Pier Giorgio Di Cicco is our Poet Laureate in Toronto)