The Pitfalls of Policy: Supporting Youth Creative Work

This is the second instalment of a two-part series in which Miranda Campbell discusses privilege, poverty, and youth creative work. Find the first part here.

All across Canada, young people are working to create small-scale creative careers for themselves.  Figuring out how to earn a living from these projects is often a difficult process of navigating and negotiating the legal and business ends of cultural production – areas in which youth often have little experience and training.  This learning by doing process of getting a career off the ground – getting out of the basement or bedroom workspace – often means that youth are earning little or no money from their creative projects in their emerging years as artists. Still, youth artistic poverty is often ignored or denigrated in media environment that suggests that young artistic types are lazy and privileged, or lazy because of their privilege.

In Out of the Basement, I discuss some of the lack of visibility of youth creative careers at the government level.  On the campaign trail in 2008, Stephen Harper said “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.” Opponents and political rivals were quick to point out the fallacy of casting artists as “rich” due to the low average incomes of artists, but another fallacy is the splitting of “ordinary working people” and “artists,” as if artists are not workers who are facing particular conditions of labour. Harper’s comments obscure the realities of young people entering into the creative industries: the young are certainly not those attending “rich galas” – if this phrase is erroneous for the majority of artists, it is particularly erroneous for the young.

Youth creative work might be better supported in other ways than simply giving out more grant money to individual artists, such as trying to ensure the existence of accessible and affordable spaces to create and showcase work.  Outdated and irrelevant policy structures sometimes can harm and even criminalize youth creative work. For example, I profile the efforts of the art and culture collective C.O.L.L.E to fight the hefty fines given out by police for putting up posters in Montreal, despite the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling about the unconstitutional nature of these laws.

In 2012, Bill C-427 was introduced into Parliament by NDP MP Tyrone Benskin (former artistic director the Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal).  This bill proposed an amendment to the Income Tax Act to allow artist and cultural workers to average their incomes between years of high and low earnings. Benskin argued that “due to the irregular hours and inconsistent incomes frequently associated with their work, artists are nearly always disadvantaged both by punitively high taxation during years of high earning and by virtue of their ineligibility for a number of Federal programs such as Employment Insurance (EI), the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and others.” Benskin’s bill was voted down, 142-121, with all votes against it coming from Conservative MPs. Similar legislation already exists in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and France.

So why do we keep getting it wrong?  A needed starting point is more awareness and knowledge about youth creative practices, and I’m trying to start this conversation by profiling youth creative work. When I explain to people what my book is about, I often hear other people’s stories of young people that they know, in their families and in their communities, who are also starting up their own creative projects and trying to make them into jobs for themselves. I think these are stories worth telling, that we should be telling, and that we need to talk about.  In Vancouver, the Safe Amplification Site Society is working to open an accessible all-ages venue, and tries to fight against the “eviction and closure of cultural spaces.” In Toronto, the Whippersnapper gallery hosted the Shop Talk Shop search centre, in which the Artist Wanted collective put on a series of events “to organize conversations on issues of labour in the arts.”

Lora Northway Die Active founder and coordinator

Last week I attended the 25^th anniversary of the artist-run centre Definitely Superior in Thunder Bay, which featured an exhibition by Die Active, its youth artist collective. Founder and coordinator Lora Northway characterizes Die Active as providing opportunities for youth to share skills and knowledge through its core activities of a yearly massive outdoor mural project, a professional exhibition, and producing a zine. Die Active’s activities also lead into employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for its youth members, with its annual “yart” sale where “youth sell whatever they’re making and “make all the profit.” Lora gives examples of youth learning skills in graffiti through the collective’s workshops and activities, then being hired to teach graffiti, and also being commissioned by local businesses and community members to do art work. Still, the collective faces challenges of sustainability, including money and space. Lora says “I don’t have time to write a new grant. Die Active has 400 members. There’s potential to do so much, but the funds are limited.”

All of these happenings involve struggle, work, and commitment, which is why I find the representation of the “lazy hipster” archetype – too often applied to young creative types – so frustrating, and lazy in itself. For better or worse, more and more young people are drawn to creative careers, and we need to figure out how to better grapple with this trend.

Miranda Campbell maps the changing realities of youth creative self-employment in the 21^st century in Out of the Basement: Youth Cultural Production in Practice and in Policy.