Arts and Culture Grants

Michelangelo's 'David.' - Ricoh Heil

by Louis Shalako





Do arts grants subsidize people’s hobbies?

In this Huffington Post article by Peter Worthington, he asks and answers that very question.

My chief objection to arts grants, both provincial and federal, is that if a client of the Ontario Disability Support Program received a cultural grant, it would be treated as income.

I wrote then-Minister the Right Honourable Margaret Meilleur in 2006 and asked, ‘What would happen if I received a cultural grant of $12.000?’

The lady never got back to me on that one. If she couldn’t answer the question, who could?

Here’s what I think.

The province would allow them the first $100 free and clear and then claw back fifty percent from of their benefits. And she didn’t want to put that in writing. Howeer, if someone very much like Mr. Worthington were to ask the present Ontario Minister of Community and Social Services, or the Minster of Culture, and ask them that question, I'm sure they understand the issues very well indeed and would be more than happy to assist him.

It is theoretically possible to operate a business under ODSP guidelines. Publishing is a business. Writing can be a hobby or a way of life. We subsidize people's way of life all the time. Don't we, Mr. Worthington?

Here's how it works for Ontario's disabled:

One, their benefits are already thirty or thirty-five percent below the poverty line. Two, a police officer twenty-three years old and starting off at $78,000 a year can get a grant, and receive the full benefit of that grant—even though they arguably don’t need financial support to write a book, create some new artwork, or to make or study music.

A provincial arts grant, a ‘book-writing grant’ can go up to $12,000 here in Ontario. The recipient can only receive $20,000 in any two-year period. You would be applying year to year. It makes no sense to go off an approximately $12,000 a year disability pension (for a single adult with no dependents) to go on a grant which can never be anything other than temporary, for the illusory notion of living on grants. With all of the free time available to the disabled—over fifty percent of whom are unemployed at the best of times, surely they have a good chance of making it as best-selling writers. After all, any asshole can write a book these days.

I don’t have serious moral issues with a teacher, a construction worker, a single mom with two kids getting cultural grants, and for the most part, writing books that don’t sell more than five hundred copies. I don’t care if they get $2,000 to make a quilt celebrating local history that will ultimately hang in the town hall. It buys goodwill for the government that provides the support. The government taxes you, but look at all the benefits it provides to regular Canadians, ‘real’ Canadians, and real Canadian culture, too.

Does it encourage ‘art?’ In some limited sense I think it does. It probably doesn’t generate too much world class fine art, but that’s not the entire spectrum of art.

But because I can’t share in that bounty, the whole thing smacks of unfairness. It looks like discrimination.

We all accept that governments stay in power by the judicious use of patronage.

Spread it around a little—a little more. Spread some of that this way. I have no idea of how ‘professional’ writers, that is to say as defined by Mr. Worthington, those who are ‘making a living at it’ feel on this issue, but I can take a quick guess or two. Because they can’t apply either as far as I know—because they don’t need it to ‘develop’ their art.

Maybe it’s unfair competition. Maybe it takes up space on bookstore shelves that might have gone to another product. Maybe it saturates a tight market with too much unprofessional and unwanted competition.

What would be of most benefit to further advance my career, my development as an artist, and who knows, maybe even be fiscally successful enough to get me off of disability?

I don’t know, but it ain’t a cultural grant. It simply doesn’t meet my needs.

Anyway, I would like to thank Mr. Worthington for his perspicuousness.

Incidentally, I’ve written ten books without any help from grants whatsoever. You might want to have a look at them here on Smashwords.


END

Cyber Security TIps for Writers and Other Professionals.

(Morguefile Photo.)

Spurious E-Mails.

We’ve all gotten those spurious e-mails from Burkina Faso where someone who is barely literate would like us to help them get $10.5 million dollars. The e-mail goes on to mention a plane crash in the jungle, and how the doctor, or the cabinet minister or the president, or alternatively the rebel leader, was the sender’s father, and how they need help getting the money from the Bank of England. It was stashed there by their corrupt government when the money was recovered, and they’re holding it for the rightful owner, but unfortunately they can’t properly identify themselves as they are destitute except for their computer…and they are rebels.

All you have to do is give them some personal banking information, and they’re willing to give you half the money because you are such a good and kind-hearted person. Some of these e-mails are fairly creative in terms of storyline. I’ve been tempted to steal that one about the Princess in the Somali refugee camp and her dad the rebel in the hills overlooking the capital city working to free the people from tyranny.

Most of these probably don't even come from Burkina Faso.

Masquerading.

Lately I’ve seen e-mails purporting to be from Chase Manhattan, Wells Fargo and others. These have a document attached to them and they want you to click on it to see the details of ‘your account.’ I don’t have an account there—kind of a dead giveaway, but logic doesn’t seem to play much role in the typical e-mail scam. I never click those documents. Never. A while back I got a spurious one from Pay Pa1.

There was a warning that if I didn’t update my account information immediately, ‘I could lose my account.’ So there is always a call to action, and from the point of view of the scammers, the more immediate and the more important-sounding, the better. I never respond to any spurious e-mail ever. While they already have your e-mail address, for all I know they might be able to get your IP address—allowing them to masquerade as you, and responding may give them other clues, more personal information, and it could even turn into a dialogue. If you had a soft head, they might go to work on you with persuasion. One e-mail claimed to be from a friend, on vacation far away, and how she had lost her phone, and she needed $1,400.00 to pay the hotel bill and fly home as their tickets were stolen too. Yet we had never really talked. It was a non-relationship, which are common enough these days.

What gave that Pay Pa1.com one away was the e-mail address of the sender. It was: PayPa1.com etc, etc. But what looks like the ‘l’ is actually a ‘1.’ The difference is pretty subtle, but of course Pay Pal already had that address sewn up. The scammers couldn’t use it. When I looked at the image/e-mail again, it was fuzzy and indistinct in some ways. It was a bogus copy, a sort of reconstituted screen shot of a Pay Pal e-mail. (The author is not an expert. –ed.)

Red-Hot Lovers.

Lately I’ve seen quite a few e-cards from red-hot lovers, again they have something they want you to click on. No one loves me, and no one is in love with me, and no one has a crush on me, so that’s usually a dead giveaway.

Notifications.

Another one is Twitter notifications. I couldn’t tell you how many times people have followed me on Twitter. Then they send a direct message. It usually goes something like this: ‘Someone is spreading nasty rumours about you on their blog,’ they provide a link to click on, and here we begin to see a bit of a pattern. Scams prey on common human failings or even human strengths, like greed, or fear, or vanity. They prey on the need to be loved, or your generousity, or the wish to be helpful. They try to play on your sympathy.

The scammers try to cover all the bases. Since I’ve never clicked on a DM link on Twitter from anyone I don’t know, (and they’re not that sophisticated to begin with,) there’s no way for me to say if it’s a virus, inappropriate photos, (a sick joke of some kind,) or perhaps in many cases just a landing page with some form of not-too-scrupulous pay-per-click application running.

Anyone you don’t know sending you photos or documents or links is an alarm signal.

Be Suspicious.

So the scammers will go on your Facebook profile page. They look through your friends list, find some of your friend’s names—say a real estate salesman. Then they pretend to be them. Here the giveaway is that the sender’s e-mail address will differ, as they can’t actually send anything if they haven’t hacked your friend’s account. That’s a whole different problem, even then, if the friend lives ten thousand miles away and you’ve never had personal contact with them, it is wise to be careful about clicking on anything, or replying to anything.

But mostly, they have to send it from somewhere else. These will often show just a nonsense jumble of letters and numbers. After a while, I learned to be suspicious of anything out of the ordinary or routine. Bad spelling and bad grammar, run-on sentences, subject matter, no previous contact, there are often a lot of subtle clues to consider.

So if someone you know on Facebook or other platform suddenly shows up in your inbox, (again with the docs, links or photos,) you should seriously ask yourself why they would be sending you things that have not been previously discussed, from a person who is certainly nice enough but you’ve never met and they live ten thousand miles away. You’ve never engaged in long chats with them, and you don’t even really know who they are. Someone like Wells Fargo is savvy enough about security (and their own reputation,) to put the message in the body of the e-mail, and any links will be the same as the official company links on their website. You can always Google it on a separate tab and see what it really is.

The most dangerous ones are the ones from someone in your hometown, as there is some psychological bond of trust there already.

You have to think about what you’re doing. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just turn off all notifications, and only use the ones like on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Clicking on links in internal messages, or in the chat box, has plenty of risks, and if you’re a writer, sooner or later you’re going to tick someone off for any number of reasons. The very fact that we have to be out there and visible can attract the attention of scammers and otherwise destructive or mischievous individuals.

Here are more tips on basic internet security from the Ontario Ministry of Consumer Affairs.