It’s difficult to trace back 2024 in the arts. Perhaps it’s because the story of the year is so much better defined by movements in and around the arts rather than through the events of certain artworks. Perhaps it’s also because us artists have an admittedly warped sense of time. I’m not speaking figuratively of any a priori existentialism, but practically. In one sense, we tend to run on the professional/scholarly calendar rather than the traditional calendar. But also, us artists arrange ourselves in one year to be able to pay our rent the following year by applying for a project for five days three years from now. Well nonetheless, I will try to tell the story of 2024 in the arts. I will hyperlink some less-than-perfect sources, say from Instagram rather than the CBC, but I have good reason. When it comes to certain news stories in the arts- cough, cough, stories related to pro-Palestinian activism- stories did not just fly under the radar of mainstream news, but it seems the radar was deliberately moved. Money was sparse in 2024. The inflation crisis and its preeminent feature, the housing crisis, renovated the financial reality of many artists and cultural workers. A coffee in the dingiest café now costs twice as much as it did a couple years ago, and rent for the dingiest of studio apartments all the same. Combined with notoriously newsworthy rejections rates for public funding grants, many artists found themselves in cross-organizational brainstorms, mutualization support groups, or filling out fix-me surveys from arts councils.

What if grants worked like insurance policies? Artists would buy into them and on the off-chance an opportunity actually struck them the granting body would be obligated to pay out and make the opportunity happen. Insurance, of course, is based on low odds. A payout is a form of surrender: “Fine, you win. Here’s your money.” The Canada Council for the Arts funded approximately 15% of Creation projects last fall . A heads up about their skeletal wallet would certainly have been helpful to the other 85% of applicants. There’s some commiseration to be done here. The applicants certainly spent hours upon hours over lukewarm coffees amping up their ideas, their CVs, and converting them into PDFs to boot. here is a type of nudity that goes into grant-writing, not just administrative nudity (“here’s how poor I am, colour-coded for your convenience”) but also emotional (“here what I care about, deeply; here’s who I am, deeply; may I please have a cookie now?”). Click here to confirm we can share this with the government however we like. This time around 85% of applicants sent their nudes and got blocked.