Does Toronto need a New Art Gallery? A New Art Prize? Or Maybe Just... Old Art Funding?

Today in the Toronto Star, Christopher Hume—well known as an urban design commentator but also the Star's former art critic—recommended that an appropriate 175th birthday gift to Toronto would be a new contemporary art gallery. In his words, a "Gehry original," "preferably on the waterfront," would be just the thing to make our city a major player on the international art scene. He also writes that MOCCA and the Power Plant just aren't fitting the bill, and that "the banking sector's continued profitability" could be counted on the provide philanthropic input.
Hume's recommendation follows a different proposal also aimed at making Toronto—and by extension, Canada—a more serious player on the global art scene. That proposal, launched with a $25-mil endowment in late January's federal budget (and much-debated since) is the Canada Prizes. To recap, the Canada Prizes are the brainchild of Luminato co-founders David Pecault and Tony Gagliano. The details are still fuzzy on how the Prizes would work. (In fact, the Heritage minister has claimed of late that the government's internal proposal is nothing like the one being discussed in the press.) But according to early reports, the Prizes would use that $25-mil public endowment to issue annual six-figure prizes to international artists, writers, dancers, and performers. Though the prizes would be named after the nation, they would be issued in Toronto, possibly with a commission for winners to follow at a future Luminato fest.

I've been thinking about the Canada Prizes and their problems for a while, as have many in the arts community. But this recommendation (however casual) about a new art gallery prompts me to outline why old art funding—and not new institutions and prizes—is what Toronto's arts sector needs right now.

Part of the issue is context. As independent critic and curator Sally McKay has of the prizes, “In and of itself it’s not a terrible idea. But after cuts to shipping subsidies and travel grants, it’s offensive to Canadian artists to suggest we should be importing artists rather than supporting what we have here.”

McKay has a point. Since being elected in 2006, the feds have cut $4.6 million from a Museum Assistance Program that helped with shipping costs for all Canadian museums; cancelled a National Portrait Gallery, wasting at least $6.5-million in investments made since 2001; cut the $11.7-million Memory Fund, which helped put Canadian museum collections online for worldwide access; eliminated the $9-million Trade Routes program, which helped groups like Hot Docs do international promotion; and axed the $4.7-million PromArt program, a travel grant administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

It seems highly unlikely that an untested $25-million “international arts prize”, or a $500-million new museum, for that matter, is going to prove more cost-effective in promoting Canadian culture or Toronto. (Cost-effectiveness, of course, being the prime gov argument for cutting these programs in the first place.) I also disagree with Hume that our "banking sector's continued profitability" can be counted on for building a new centre. Arts fests and institutions in TO are already struggling to keep the corporate sponsorships they have in this haven't-yet-hit-bottom recessiontime '09.

What would be preferable in the current context is better promoting and supporting the resources we have—like, hey, the newly reopened AGO (hell, how'd the shine go off that one so fast?) as well as the Power Plant, MOCCA, ROM, Nuit Blanche, TIAF, rafts of festivals, artist-run centres, collectors and commercial galleries, and, last but not least, artists themselves.

How would this enhanced promotion of existing resources work? Well, there are some basic things Toronto institutions and fests could partner on, like international press junkets. I've been informed that such junkets did happen last fall around the Nuit Blanche, TIAF and the City of Toronto—but it was mainly for US press, and there is whole world of art reporters and art outlets out there who know nothing about Toronto, and therefore never write about it or notice news releases from it. It is simply not on the radar. While many media outlets refuse junkets due to ethical reasons—which I can totally understand—a number of them, particularly in international art media, depend on junkets to make reporting on art fairs possible. This is a small idea, but one example, I hope, of how more international awareness of Toronto's art strengths could be developed without a new prize or new buildings.

More important than promotion, though, is to support the institutions we do have that have already given Canada multiple international breakthroughs. These institutions—by which I mean artist grants, festival grants and program grants—are far less glamourous than the opening of a new building or the buzz of an awards ceremony. But they have consistently, in their slow, trickle-up way, provided the international-profile work that people beyond our borders know about.

For instance, The Drowsy Chaperone, Canada’s most recent Broadway hit, was developed in part at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Cannes-Prizewinning director Denys Arcand honed his chops making docs for the now-anemically-funded National Film Board. Artist Jana Sterbak, whose work is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, among other international museums, had her first exhibitions at artist-run centres like YYZ. And I'll speculate that FACTOR money helped Feist pay the rent long before Steve Jobs et al. started signing her rights cheques.

Bottom line: When creative production and promotion of creative production are already well supported, then it's appropriate to fund and talk up new prizes and new buildings—that visible top tip of the arts industry iceberg. But given the evisceration this industry, and others, have recently experienced in terms of funding supports and market shrinkage, attention must be paid to that less-glamourous infrastructure. Or, as playwright Michael Wheeler argued on the Praxis Theatre blog last month, “What would happen if … the government set up a prize to see what really cool cars auto companies from other countries could show off here at the auto show once a year? Would that make us a hotbed of automotive genius?”

What do you think?