AL11 — Why Did Our Arts Organizations Say Nothing While a Reported Genocide Unfolded?
Foreword — You’d be right to take one look at the title above and wonder, “Where is the equally spirited outcry for the 1,139 victims of the October 7th massacre?” To be sure, our compassion extends to every Jewish victim killed, injured, or abducted on that day, as well as to the broader Jewish diaspora here in Canada that is still reeling from the trauma inflicted by the senseless and aimless killings carried out by Hamas terrorists. But there are never two sides to a genocide, nor to the genocide being carried out in Gaza1234. While nothing that happened since the 1948 Nakba can justify the October 7th attacks, nothing that happened on that day can justify the atrocities that have been committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank since October. With the international community paralyzed by this deadlock of unjustifiable actions, we ought to be able to turn to the publicly funded institutions in our local communities—arts organizations especially—for a moral compass or consolation in the face of this complexity. Aside from the unanimous condemnation of the Hamas attacks, there has been little to nothing said by these organizations in empathy for the Palestinian civilians caught in the middle of this conflict. As Toronto-based arts writer and worker Emily Jung asks below: “What is the future of a Canadian arts sector that is afraid to condemn over 36,000 deaths including over 13,000 children, the destruction of cultural spaces and heritage sites, and the killing of artists and cultural workers?” To understand this fear, and predict the trajectory of this future, she takes a perspective that looks at, and beyond, this conflict to understand why it seems our arts organizations are not designed to take rapid moral action, especially when it’s inconvenient. — Michael Zarathus-Cook
“Analysis Of International Law And Its Application To Israel’s Military Actions Since October 7, 2023”. University Network For Human Rights, International Human Rights Clinic, Boston University School Of Law, International Human Rights Clinic, Cornell Law School, Centre For Human Rights, University Of Pretoria, Lowenstein Human Rights Project, Yale Law School. (May 15, 2024)
“Rights expert finds “reasonable grounds” genocide is being committed in Gaza” United Nations. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976. (March 26, 2024)
Bouranova, A. (2024, June 5). “Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? new report from BU School of Law’s international human rights clinic lays out case”. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/is-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza/
“UN Special Rapporteur Report on Gaza provides crucial evidence that must spur international action to prevent genocide”.
Amnesty International. (2024, March 28). https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/03/un-special-rapporteur-
report-on-gaza-provides-crucial-evidence-that-must-spur-international-action-to-prevent-genocide/
WORDS BY EMILY JUNG
If you’ve worked in the arts, you know that asking the “why” behind the actions of an arts organization seldom leads to productive conversation. Instead, such questions tend to spark a cycle of shrugging and responsibility-hot-potato until we are ready to throw it toward the ultimate and empty villain: “the arts ecosystem.” The wiles of this elusive and ethereal villain allow everyone to seemingly stand on the same side and demand accountability from this non-responsive structure.
When Cannopy invited me to reflect on the question: “Why did our arts organizations say nothing as this genocide unfolded?”—my instinctual response was: “The arts ecosystem is colonial and broken. It upholds the colonial agenda of its funders,” and from this proceed to write about Canada’s historical and current role in colonial violence. Likewise, I could very easily blame this silence on threats by Zionist extremists, our arguably Islamophobic society, conservative board members, major donors, and corporate sponsors—altogether painting a picture of the powerless nonprofit organizations and their workers who are tirelessly navigating these variables. But I’ve opted for a more uncomfortable and perhaps unexciting answer:
I believe arts organizations are saying nothing, or very little because they have consciously and subconsciously assessed the benefits and risks of speaking on this issue, and have calculated that staying silent poses the least amount of risk to the brand. Similarly, these organizations will begin saying something when the benefits of publicly condemning Israel’s aggression against Palestinian civilians begin to outweigh the risk of doing so. If these observations seem rather obvious to you, I contend that we’ve gotten far too comfortable with the fact of this arrangement.
This comfortability is the reason why I think the silence of Canada’s prominent arts organizations requires deeper scrutiny. The same engine of superficial protocols that procured the empty anti-racism statements we saw during the most recent BLM movement are the ones that now refuse to explicitly condemn this inhumane atrocity being committed on the people of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank. The problem begins then not with any particular atrocity, but with the creation of this institutional engine of superficiality.
The institutionalization of the arts sector in Canada was largely expedited by the creation of various arts administration programs that formed across the country beginning about 50 years ago. This has created a pathway towards the corporatization, automation and, inevitability, neutralization of passion in the arts. Maybe this is a naive hypothesis being made by someone who has not “had it worse,” but as a graduate of one of these programs and as an administrator in this sector, this hypothesis haunts me and I must investigate it.
The flaws in the frameworks of this “Canadian arts ecosystem” are not only moral but also economic. It is designed to sustain corporations, not foster entrepreneurship. They are wealth management tools of the wealthy. It traps workers inside a dead-end career path and bribes them with gourmet pizza for morale. This poorly but intentionally designed ecosystem has manifested into one that is administered by a culture of self-preservation that aims to train and hire self-preserving artists, self-preserving arts workers, and self-preserving arts leaders. All the while claiming to be at the vanguard of cultural progress and modern artistic expression. Perhaps this is why the art coming out of nonprofit institutions in Canada today is seldom evocative or compelling.
As a marketing professional working in theatre, I am often asked: “You work in marketing!? So maybe you can tell us honestly, is theatre dead?” Theatre can never die. Theatre is the opposite of death. However, many of the arts institutions that dominate the front-facing conversations of the Canadian theatre sector are, in this sense, not alive. They are machines that churn artists and workers as ingredients to create art, and then dispose of them when the opportunity is ripe. A machine does not choose to act morally simply for the sake of morality. A machine of the West is not capable of condemning a genocide happening in the Middle East.
For an abbreviated history of how this machine came to be: in 1951, the infamous Massey Report—The Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in Arts, Letters and Sciences—laid the foundation for some key cultural systems in Canada, including the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957. Canadian cultural policy was (and is) heavily influenced by UNESCO’s cultural policy work throughout the 60s and 70s. Policies such as “arms-length” funding and the notion of “arts as a social good” were influenced by this time. In the 1960s, the first “Arts Management” programs began forming in the UK, Canada, the US, and Austria. In 1968, The Ontario Arts Council published The Awkward Stage: The Ontario Theatre Study Report, which included a recommendation to create a program in arts administration. This recommendation was taken in by Jim Gillies, Chairman of the Economics and Administration Committee at York University, leading to the creation of Canada’s first graduate-level Arts Administration program in the Schulich School of Business in 1969.
Similarly, Professor Paul Schafer, who was one of the founders of Schulich’s Arts Administration program, was invited to design experiential learning programs at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus—launching the first Undergraduate-level Arts Management program in Canada, in 1984. In 1986, the Canadian Association of Arts Administration Educators (CAAAE) studied and published the arguments for professional Arts Administration training in Canada. In 2012, like many of my peers, I had to choose a post-secondary education to pursue. My immigrant parents felt it was crucial for me to receive training in Arts Management if I was to pursue the arts in a new country. In 2016, I completed my Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Arts Management program. In 2020, my good friend and fellow Arts Management graduate Jason Li connected with me over Zoom—as jobless Asian Canadians isolating in our apartments during the COVID-19 pandemic, we reflected on our last four years since graduating school. Jason had pursued his work in experiential education in the arts but became very frustrated by the lack of safe and proper opportunities available to arts students. I pursued a career in arts administration, but experiencing institutional toxicity in three different arts disciplines led me into a state of severe burnout. Watching several colleagues and artists leave the sector, we decided to turn the table around and interrogate our arts sector on why it is the way it is.
We put our volunteer labour and money together and created a website, an email address, and a mission statement. We named this conceptual arts worker collective “Labour in the Arts”. The arts sector didn’t realize or care that we were scrutinizing it, we were so insignificant it was almost liberating. But the more we researched the more disappointing it became. I realized there weren’t plot twists or a big evil agenda behind any of this lack of moral agency. We had just been surviving inside a 70-year-old cycle of complicity and self-preservation at any cost. To keep pace with the rising cost of living, arts workers and artists have to compete for networks that lead to paid opportunities, jobs that will barely sustain us, and nebulous grant applications that are rarely successful. Without the rise of the management class, a system of this sort would not have survived—artists come along for the bumpy ride, but the managers are firmly in the driver’s seat.
When Hamas launched an attack on Israeli civilians and military bases killing 1,139 people, the world knew approximately how Israel would respond. But did we expect to witness 6000 bombs being dropped in the concentrated region of the Gaza Strip that week? I work as a marketing professional in the arts, and the last thing I wanted to do was write an institutional statement on behalf of my company. But after a conversation with my boss we decided to make a post in solidarity with Palestinians in the weeks following the Hamas attacks. We put up a Free Palestine poster in our building. We went to protests. But months have passed. My brain cannot comprehend what losing over 36,000 lives means.
On May 15, 2024—the 76th anniversary of the Nakba—Labour in the Arts became a platform for an open letter co-written by five arts workers (including myself) that called upon the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) and its member companies to break their silence about Palestine. The question we had for PACT and its members was: “What is the future of a Canadian arts sector that is afraid to condemn over 36,000 deaths including over 13,000 children, the destruction of cultural spaces and heritage sites, and the killing of artists and cultural workers?” This open letter collected over 460 signatures from Canadian artists and arts workers within two weeks of its publication. I cannot speak on whether this letter has made even a dent in the Canadian theatre industry, what I can say is that the 460 people who signed this letter, including my four colleagues who agreed to co-write this letter, do not stand to benefit from this letter whatsoever. The five of us discussed how our careers in the arts, both artistic and administrative, will stay even more precarious for a while.
What does it mean to push the boundaries of art in the year 2024? An organ somewhere in Germany is still playing composer John Cage’s experimental musical piece, As Slow as Possible, which is estimated to end in 2640. How will art historians in 2640 describe the moral state of this moment? On May 15, 2024, The Theatre Centre and Poetry for Palestine Toronto held a non-stop 24-hour reading of Palestinian poetry, with over 100 readers reciting poems by Palestinian poets. Several arts leaders from Toronto theatre companies were present to read. Art is not something that weighs and calculates its message against benefits and losses. Art throws its naked body towards a concrete wall in protest of something that seems unbreakable. An industry that chooses to preserve itself over standing with its workers is not capable of pushing the boundaries of art forward. A sector that preserves its structure instead of its artists holds little artistic power. Art that cannot stand up against injustices diminishes its impact on stage.
Another reason for the abbreviated history of “Arts Management” above is also to put forward the thought that this present arts ecosystem was arrived at through a series of actions that began from theories. Many arts workers, including artists, are currently situated inside a system that has not even been in practice for 100 years. No matter how precarious our situation is, we have the ability to change the course of history that is to come. We have the ability to challenge this existing system and to search for answers from much more robust and hitherto untapped sources of wisdom such as the Indigenous communities that predate this country, from Black leaders and Queer artists, and courageous female leaders.
One way Labour in the Arts proposes to take action is to bring the conversations that are happening in institutionalized boardrooms back into the workrooms. We believe arts workers should be the thought leaders behind arts labour. We are a small voice, but our voice comes from practice, lived experience, and action. In doing so, I’d also like to end with a call to small actions:
Observe how your labour is circulated in the spaces that you work in, and where you hold power in that ecosystem in relation to other workers.
Consider and rethink your labour in the broadest context. For example, what does your role entail from the perspective of arts advocacy?
Think about impact in a way that centers community. If, because of for your activism, you lost a major donor, did you “fail to retain revenue” or did you take the risk to stay true to your company’s artistic mission and mandate to serve its community?
From one small voice to another, I send you my solidarity as we struggle to break free from this suffocating culture of self-preservation and respectability politics at the expense of everything else, not least being the art we make. I see a future for us, where art can be created freely in an exciting space that breathes, grows, acts with a moral compass and is, therefore, alive.
I do not claim to be a leading voice in arts activism. I would like to express gratitude to organizers (contemporary and passed) at the forefront of political activism, for Black Lives Matter, for #LandBack, for Palestine liberation—the list goes on. The persistent efforts and organized actions by activists in all disciplines help us feel like we are not alone. While this essay is critical of the structure of institutions, we must acknowledge the many organizations and artists in the arts community that have stood up against the occupation of Palestine. In 2021, for example, over a hundred artists signed the demand for an art centre to divest from Zionist funding. In November 2023, over 400 artists signed an open letter titled “Move Your People: A Call to Canadian Arts Institutions to Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza”.
Since then, there has also been an open letter by Theatre Artists for Palestinian Voices, calling for artists to take a stance against injustice. Numerous theatre companies have been giving space to events like The Gaza Monologues and the fundraiser by Theatre Artists for Palestinian Voices. I also acknowledge that there are theatre companies who have called for a permanent ceasefire weeks, months, and even years before the Labour in the Arts’ open letter. On May 3, 2024, I attended a screening of short films about Palestine that was screened inside the encampment at the University of Toronto. That week, artists programmed a counter-program to the Hot Docs festival called No Arms in the Arts festival. The #StopArtWashing initiative protested Scotiabank’s large investment in Elbit Systems (an Israeli weapons producer) while funding major arts events in Canada such as the Giller Prize in Literature and the Contact Photography Festival.
I’d like to thank Jason Li and Josh Marchesini for their help on this article, as well as my professors from my studies in the arts and arts management. As I criticize the program’s role in this system, I cannot deny that I have benefitted from its guidance—ironically, I don’t know if I would have been able to advocate for the arts in this way if it hadn’t been for my learnings from the program. I’d like to thank Amanda Lin, Victoria Wang, Josh Marchesini, and Shanae Sodhi, who are my co-writers of our open letter to PACT and PACT member organizations. These colleagues have tirelessly been leading and supporting one another throughout this process and beyond—on top of the work they already do in the arts and in advocacy.
PACT has, in response to our open letter, added two sessions in the 2024 PACTcon: 1. Optional Town Hall – The Role of Organizations in Divisive Times, and 2. Workplace Rights & Responsibilities in the Digital Realm.