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. Many artists reshaped their negotiations with presenters and producers by assuming public funding for their projects would not be secured rather than the conventional model that would be the opposite. When not playing a losing game, artists found themselves pounding the pavement with CVs from restaurant to restaurant, inventing side hustles, or dusting off the Pleasers to make ends briefly meet. 

The harsh reality that our funding model favours projects rather than people, that we have no statut d’artiste for example, left its mark on 2024. Indeed, the favoured gameplan of arts councils in Canada this year has been to make funding more accessible, with less red tape and more come-one-come-all inclusion. Seldom are gameplans imagined that involve protecting working artists, ensuring those with some red tape proudly behind them have sustainable, respected livelihoods. Nodding along to artists’ financial concerns, in October the CAC published an open letter urging artists to reach out to changemakers in their communities with the information that art matters- that it is a source of employment, tourism, and impact in terms of gathering around difficult questions. I’ll add that to my to-do list. 

2024 was the year of the red in Canadian arts. For starters, many spreadsheet cells were in the red. Despite keeping up appearances, handfuls of artist-run centres, producers, and artistic nonprofits across Canada struggled to pump out financially productive material, rolling up their sleeves to dig into the last of the pandemic-era piggy-banks. Memories of COVID were no longer frightful shudders at the recollection of curfews or toilet paper tug-of-wars, but wistful sighs at the memory of laissez-faire emergency funds used at organisations’ discretion- funds that fell from trees to help a world in financial vertigo, and at that particular time, the arts were included in the world for a change. Now with the emergency button disappearing in the distance, many arts organisations in 2024 finished up financially padded projects and braced themselves for the next chapter: returning to a more expensive world, to a world of sparser funding and thinner envelopes from arts councils. 2024 was the year I was invited to brainstorms at multiple organisations incited by the need to imagine new realities amidst inevitable downsizings. 2024 might well have been the winter of many orgs’ lives, only all year long. Thankfully, arts organisations united and protested efficiently, decrying public funding cuts to the arts. Unfortunately, the general public was seldom seen demanding more art. 

Spring of 2024 was notably marked by mobilisation in Québec against the provincial arts budget cut. The cut was provided with a band-aid solution. The provincial budget cut was reduced rather than counterweighted, meaning cut less, and the newly re-allocated funds were re-allocated to institutions rather than artists, drawing some criticism. What can at least be applauded is the efficient cross-disciplinary mobilisation of arts organisations and artists. We can all agree we need money, whether we’re fresh-faced fine arts grads or primetime cable stars.

The changing of spreadsheet cells to red must have taken up plenty of time at arts orgs that could not possibly have been spent making public statements acknowledging the genocide in Palestine. In 2024, it goes without saying that Palestine was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, it went completely without saying for hundreds of arts organisations across Canada. Of course, we are accustomed to this silence from most MPs and government officials, where we are used to being unable to distinguish the lapdog from the lap, but the silence from artistic institutions, who so often nominate themselves as timely, radical, and “actively working toward decolonization” came across to many artists as jarring. On the ground and online, I heard artists express discomfort working in spaces or under institutions where an elephant in the room went unacknowledged. This silence was not always passive- probably backlogged by board meetings and vetoed by higher-ups- but sometimes active. The Aurora Cultural Centre, for instance, shut down an exhibition involving two artists whose works were critical of Israel. Let us remember as well that universities count as artistic institutions. Concordia University intervened with a last-minute administrative excuse to cancel a film screening organised by Regards Palestiniens, repeating history from the same event with the same fate at Cinéma du Parc the previous year. In Toronto, CAMH cancelled a Palestinian film screening all the same, and on World Mental Health Day to boot.

Of course, a particular red-scare tone was set for 2024 at the end of the previous year by  Wanda Nanibush’s scandalous firing from the AGO following her words of Indigenous solidarity with Palestinians. In 2024, the “difficult questions” the CAC so earnestly insists we insist on were negotiated behind closed doors, or at least behind password protected emails. It’s a reminder that on-the-ground cultural workers have desires and initiatives that are not granted with the blessing of higher-ups, that get caught up in the world of donors, boards, and the optics of the gala-going elite. And so, events like Regards Palestinians’ film screenings were cancelled with the swiftness of a few emails from university administrators. I’m sure these administrative interventions were complete with land acknowledgements in their e-signatures.

Of course, the road to public funding is paved with good intentions. In 2024, I likely attended about three art events per week on average (say screenings, concerts, performances, plays, expos), and I can say it is seriously possible that the majority of text I experienced in these spaces was in welcoming speeches signed-sealed-and sometimes stumblingly delivered by cultural workers behind microphones before the event was fully underway (this moment seems- by assumption- considered to be when attention is most porous). Of course, virtually none of these speeches ever seem to have the bright idea to replace the apparently archaic programme by mentioning whose work is being shown and which collaborators are behind it.

Was it just me or in 2024 did the land acknowledgements seem to get more drawn-out and labyrinthine in their content, more prone to stumbling and apologetic giggles too? Have the white-led land acknowledgements become longer to convince ourselves, in the homes of institutions, that we all keep afloat a sense of solidarity with Indigenous people while the same institutions remain silent on day-to-day colonisation in Palestine, or while they cancel certain events, statements, and certain careers? In his work and recently in interview, Toronto-based artist Cliff Cardinal, who is of Cree, Dene, and Lakota heritage, has lambasted the institutional land acknowledgement as a soundbite white artists have run with, a platitude that presupposes genocide as a historical inevitability. In 2024, I listened to pre-show warnings gradually leave out mentions of emergency exits or stroboscopes yet run amok with exhaustive trigger warnings, greenlit or not by the artists, where welcome people warned us of what the following performance or works on display might make us think of. All this seemed to me dissonant in a world where you can swipe from story to story on Instagram and see gruesome content that for many, necessitates the opposite of a warning, but an instruction not to look away. I heard pre-show speeches sprawl into pass-the-hat territory, finding some tactful transition from territorial acknowledgments into the by-the-ways of their own fundraising needs. Sometimes elusive mentions of “difficult times in the world today” were vaguely brushed in. Another noteworthy moment of 2024 in the arts for me was witnessing a well-established Canadian company address a regional audience with a pre-show speech essentially listing the highlights of their company CV and explaining that they had, in fact, gone out of their way to give rural communities the occasion to see their work. All this was complete with reminders that they were used to larger, more fabulous venues. Would someone have the gall to say such nonsense if the performance of a welcome speech had not, by 2024, become a sort of ever-expanding Winchester House, a single unit upon which one must never stop building? If I may yank out the Sharpie and draw a vision on my crystal ball, I predict a bursting point of the welcome speech in the coming years.

Artists, particularly of the self-employed, no-strings attached type, certainly expressed pro-Palestinian solidarity throughout the year. Much disruption was directed at institutions, events, and prizes, particularly those tainted by ties to Scotiabank, and therefore Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor. In literature, the Scotiabank Giller Prize has been a lodestone for disruption, being faced with the drop-out of over two dozen artists from consideration. The prize has since dropped Scotiabank from its name, though not yet from its funding makeup, due to contractual obligations. Circling back to the question of what an organisation, rather than an artist, compels itself to communicate to its public, say before introducing a work, or in a public statement, or permanently on its website, the prize’s executive director contends that some things go without saying, telling us the prize “wasn’t asked to take a side in the climate debate or the fallout from 9/11.” The reminder is that voice is given to artists by organizations, that a personne morale is not supposed to do anything outside of its mandate. They have also requested that people stop bullying those who haven’t dropped out of consideration. I’ll also add that to my to-do list.

In film, TIFF had at least one Israeli state-funded film protested by activists on the spot, and in visual arts, artTO and Contact Festival were disrupted and/or boycotted. Some artists concealed their work from exhibition in protest, and other artists refused prizes based on their funding sources. Activism, not exclusively from artists mind you, indeed preceded some results, as in Scotiabank slashing a major chunk of their investments with Elbit Systems, although connection to protest has been unacknowledged by the company, and has even been dismissed as a naive reach.

For many artists in 2024, art itself was an afterthought, an office job with its own logic that faded in and out of the here and now, whereas mobilisation and discussion around Palestine remained at the forefront of many Canadian artists’ thought and action. All this was in direct counterbalance to the silence of institutions where of course, silence is golden.

Speaking of gold, there was no shortage of coverage this year for the Paris Olympics, which artists may have little to do with but existing in the grey-zones of sport and art in judged events such as synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, or in the other angles of this grey-zone: nationalism and entertainment. We can recall the apparently scandalous inclusion of drag in the opening ceremonies or the triumphant comeback of a diamond-studded Céline Dion live from the Eiffel Tower. Breakdancing was in the spotlight this year as a newly included sport again testing the tolerance level for artistic performance within athletics. One major event of 2024 that was simultaneously over-discussed (by the meme-making public général) and under-discussed (by us incisive, high-minded artists) serves as a necessary agenda point in revisiting the year. I’m talking about Ray-Gun, the Olympic breakdancer who fell from grace after a disastrously stilted performance at Paris 2024. Scandal lit the Olympic flame when it was discovered that this awkward, amateurish, but enthusiastic breakdancer who brought shame to the expressly cancelled sport turned out to be a lecturer, researcher, and published academic on the subject of breaking. With Ray-Gun as our first celebrity artist-academe in memory, have we missed a conversation on not only the ethics, but specifically on the aesthetics of academically fuelled art practices? Much chatter has been had about how public funding shapes art- or directs and dilutes it into certain directions- but the universities, the very ones that were camped on in 2024, are also artistic institutions that can do the same. Is Ray-Gun a cautionary tale of art broken in by the postgrad setting, of how skyscraping universities risk disconnect from on-the-ground art scenes, so often pumping out (or in) agoraphobic but well-funded work that misreads the field at hand and furthers the divide of artist and public with pocket change to spare? Amidst the financial crisis of Canadian arts, how many universities have cut a deal and opened their state-of-the-art studios and venues to producers in crisis, or alumni in need of a piece of equipment? I know, too much red tape, and maybe we’re all too poor anyway. Or perhaps the universities are too busy cancelling Palestinian film screenings on campus.

In other news, Canadian artists also mobilised under the direction of Calgarian indie rock royalty Tegan & Sara, who in March 2024 took a stand at legislation proposed by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith related to trans youth. The open letter was signed by over 400 Canadian intergenerational artists and cultural workers, reaching the star-studded heights of, say, Nelly Furtado and Neil Young, all the way to such and such artistic director you’re waiting on an email back from, and all the while including trans artists of more niche domains. Perhaps slipping under the radar were testimonies from trans artists such as Montréal-based musician and multidisciplinary artist Elle Barbara, who did not sign the letter, counterweighting a different approach to defining what is and isn’t necessarily anti-trans, specifically in regards to youth. 

Incidentally, in November, Premiere Smith won her bid as party leader again, with her party motioning to recognize CO2 as a nutrient essential to human life rather than a pollutant. It’s a far cry from where we sit as artists, behind computers assuring funders we will build our objects out of recycled material from the dump and rollerblade to our install.

As the Giller Prize navigated boycott, a two-time previous winner and Canada’s only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (also currently being boycotted), passed away: Alice Munro. An undisputed literary genius and master of the short story, Munro’s death invites eulogy and attention toward her opus. In the year of the open letter, this invitation to re-read was complicated by a devastating op-ed Munro’s daughter provided to the Toronto Star following her mother’s death, recounting sexual abuse at the hands of Munro’s husband, and suggesting that some of Munro’s characters- say, amenable wives and estranged mothers- were not written purely out of writerly intuition but out of experience. Munro’s daughter urges readers to keep her own story in mind when reading and discussing her mother’s work. With a pre-show warning now playing in our heads as we re-read certain Munro masterpieces- themselves rich with chilling, psychosexual themes- the age old question of separating art from artist has inevitably been raised.

2024 is perhaps best recounted as a year in which art was indeed separated from the artist, but in a different sense. Whether artists withdrew their books from consideration for a prize, sheathed their work from public display after being installed, or were seen just as often picketing in the streets as they were sipping wine at opening night, artwork itself was secondary to mobilisation and opinion in and around art. It would be wonderful to praise certain works, artists, and organisations, but my geographic biases would of course be too limiting.

As 2024 closes, federal elections are just around the corner, and Canadians’ values- political and economical- are up for negotiation. Our downstairs neighbour’s election map has been recently painted with a fresh coat of red paint, raising flags (red ones too, in fact), that public opinion may well be trending conservative. Voters beware. After all, money doesn’t grow on trees at the CAC, but is allocated by the government, and funded by tax-payers- be them buskers, baristas, bankers, or bigwigs. However, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree, and so in 2025, artists and organisations will undoubtedly continue playing fetch with the assigned values of the arts councils, and, in turn, the government. Public funding comes with an explicit catch: that money creates a contract between artist, public, and government, wherein the artist is expected to provide something in return, something beneficial- whether practically, or optically. One must wonder if a reasonably unknown Alice Munro or Neil Young would get their creation grant today. Ray-Gun probably would.

If only we could push off 2025 a few months to organize ourselves better, to make a few more ends meet. If only, like the CAC just did to their research grant results, add an extra 4.5 months this year.

As the year ends, the weather remains surprisingly warm and the grass eerily green. I guess the green of brat summer has extended itself. Charli XCX’s “Apple” blares down the aisles of any given Loblaws amidst offensively jacked prices. Every day death tolls increase abroad, and these figures will not wrap up soundly at the end of the year- scholarly, fiscal, or the one you count on your knuckles.