Indeed, since the redesign of the Canada Council’s programs, these aspects have become evaluation criteria and represent a significant portion of the evaluation of applications.
However, in addition to the questions raised by the addition of these extra-artistic criteria in the evaluation of artistic project proposals, political notions related to the issues of artists’ social responsibility and the real or fictional effect that the arts can have on social transformations, several members of the artistic community are looking for objectives to achieve and on what basis to determine targets and indicators in their respective contexts. Should organizations influence their programming, their staff, their board of directors, their procedures and mechanisms, their infrastructures?
Beyond the need for these transformations, which no one doubts, the absence of clear guidelines and procedures gives the evaluation of these criteria an impression of arbitrariness and ideological framework that may not effectively advance this important cause. In order to better shed light on this issue and to try to answer members’ questions, CQAM will organize a meeting on this theme with CAC officers in the spring of 2019.
