Starving Artists : Part Four by Dave Jaffe

         Starving Artists - Part Four


    Emily Carr was just not unlucky being born in 1871 and dying just before the great consumer boom  started in North America in 1945. She also was unlucky by being born maybe in the wrong country, namely Canada instead of the United States.
      The U.S.'s Gross National Product is at least 12 times Canada's. By the early 20th century when Carr was in her 30's, magnates like the Harrimans, the Mellons, the Carnegies, J.P. Morgan and Leland Stanford, had amassed vast fortunes. A very small part of their money went to buy fine art. In Canada by 1900 there were some multimillionaires too, but nothing of the scale of the American very rich.
    So money spent on the visual arts in Canada has rarely come close to money spent on these things in the U.S. of A. Some present day Canadian artists have made some decent money. Yet their proceeds can't come close to the incomes of American artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons.
   In the 1950's, the Canadian government set up the Canada Council to aid visual artists and other creative people."I'm applying for a Canada Council grant," a musician who played modern music said in the 1970's. Yet these grants that are a good thing can't make any artist lots of money. 
      Then, too, after 1945 and the end of the Second World war thousands of men and quite a few women went to universities and colleges to study the visual artists. This was a big change in Canada. Yet there was a downside to this trend. Competition for grants and art sales became much more intense because there were many more artists than there were in say 1930. So many artists lost out in the struggle to earn a decent living from their work.
      "I can't afford to buy my own work," an artist with the Bau-Xi gallery said in Vancouver just before one of her exhibitions opened. Her paintings on the gallery's walls were priced from $5,000 to $12,000. "My work is for rich people and not for people like me."
     For whatever reason, artists of all sorts keep popping up in Canada. Yet most visual artists and probably many other creative people won't get rich or earn too much money from their work.
    That's just the way it is in Canada right now and will be for the foreseeable future.