Thoughtful breakdown of the institutional funding paradox. The part about disbanding the committee after a democratic vote is wild becasue it undermines the entire model they deliberately built. Saw something similiar at a university board I served on where we invited donor input then got squeamish when they actually exercised it.
Your analysis, while carefully constructed, conveniently ignores the structural power inequities and political motivations that dictate how public services are administered in Ontario. You treat the financialization of the public sphere as an immutable law of nature, ignoring the disproportionate influence of capital and its permeation/intrusion into public realms that make little sense for rational markets to operate in.
You cite a struggling healthcare system as a logical justification for the province’s neglect of arts funding. This deliberately sidesteps the reality that this is a manufactured crisis. The provincial government has made deliberate policy choices to underfund healthcare and adjacent public services, starving the civic trust to force public institutions into the arms of private donors just to stay afloat.
The fact of the matter is that many other jurisdictions—domestically and internationally—fund their cultural institutions, transit, and healthcare adequately because they recognize them as a public good, not as commercial enterprises optimized for instrumental utility. Ask yourself: why is the AGO not on par with global institutions like the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum? Why is it not even the best gallery in Canada? (The Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, which operates with far stronger state backing and cultural protection, possesses a vastly superior curatorial layout and rigor).
The answer is the funding model. The AGO, forced to generate 75% of its revenue, is trapped in a cycle of soliciting "loud money." It must prioritize spectacle and donor appeasement over curatorial truth.
This is not a problem that corporate donorship can solve, because artistic freedom, counterculture, and intellectual rigor—the very things that make art worthy of pursuit—are fundamentally opposed to the demands of capital. By demanding that curators cater to the sensibilities of wealthy benefactors, the elites you protect seek to bend these institutions to their will, imparting a narrow, neoliberal perspective onto spaces that are supposed to challenge those exact paradigms and keep them in check.
If the dissenting views you dismiss were truly as marginal or "fringe" as you claim, there would not have been such a marked public outcry demanding the AGO disband its politically motivated committees. That outcry was not a fringe reaction; it was the public's immune response to the commodification of their heritage.
Let’s not pretend that the AGO’s current dependency on corporate sponsorship is an incontrovertible fact of life. It is the result of a deliberate, ideological choice by elites to colonize the last remaining vestiges of free expression and the public realm. When you ask curators to simply accept this, you aren't asking for pragmatism; you are demanding the surrender of their very ontology.
Thanks for those thoughtful perspectives. Two questions present themselves: 1) How should the Provincial government increase funding for the AGO? It has to either raise taxes, or take from some other corner of the Provincial budget. 2) The only evidence I’ve seen of “a marked public outcry” is an online petition signed by people who also happen (in the 90% overlapping range by my analysis, anyway) to oppose Israel’s handling of the Hamas attack of Oct 7th. That a couple of people quit a committee isn’t particularly newsworthy. That the Goldin piece in question isn’t seen to be part of her best work is not lost on me, nor the fact that many on that AGO Committee didn’t believe this was the right time for a Canadian institution to be adding yet another American work (instead of a worthy Canadian artist) to its already huge collection of same.
1) This is a false choice. You are framing the budget as a static zero-sum game to avoid discussing prioritization. The Ontario government regularly finds billions for 'corners' like the Highway 413 project or the relocation of the Ontario Science Centre—projects that serve specific development interests. Budgeting is not a math problem; it is a moral one. When the province chooses to fund a $10-billion highway while providing the second-lowest per-capita healthcare funding in Canada (according to the FAO), it isn't 'balancing' a budget; it is actively choosing to starve the public realm to subsidize private industry. Your question also assumes that 'Growth' can only happen through infrastructure and extraction. But cultural institutions ARE the infrastructure of the soul. By underfunding them, you aren't saving money, you are incurring a pseudo cultural deficit that makes the city less livable, less imaginative, and ultimately less valuable, even by your own economic metrics. This is further evidenced by the recent departure of Julian Cox, the chief curator. When the most renowned talent refuses to be affiliated with the AGO (facing a reputational crisis) you are incurring negative externalities invisible on the balance sheet.
2) You mention that the Goldin piece wasn't 'part of her best work.' That is a curatorial judgment. In a healthy institution, that judgment belongs to the curators, not the trustees. The fact that the Modern and Contemporary Curatorial Working Committee actually voted to acquire it, only to be blocked by a trustee-led campaign proves this wasn't an 'acquisition criteria' issue; it was a political veto. This is conclusion is further substantiated by the fact that two other co-acquirers, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, did not in fact face the same fate - it proves the exclusivity of this problem to AGO where it has shown a willingness to appease the donor class; not very different from the politics of our neighbours to our south. When capital starts to dominate and govern pretty well every facet of our lives, it is antithetical to democracy (and demos) itself.
3) Whether the petition signers are 90% or 10% aligned on a specific geopolitical issue is irrelevant to the fact that a senior curator (John Zeppetelli) and multiple committee members resigned in protest. If you add Julian Cox to the mix as I mentioned above, the defensive stance you've taken is becoming harder to justify. When professional curators (the very people whose expertise you rely on) quit because they believe the institution's integrity has been compromised by donor interference, that is the definition of a crisis. You are focusing on the 'who' of the protest to deflect the 'why' of the resignations. This is why your argument is best framed within a power structure lens - the same type of influence of capital also are deeply interlinked other political issues of today.
Our arts institutions are essential for showcasing a diversity of thought, perspective, and experience, and for bringing people together in shared spaces. They aren’t just for the 1% - they provide inspiration and aspiration to the artists who participate in the Riverdale Art Walk, to the musicians performing in local bars, and to the millions of tourists who visit our city. The network effect of our cultural institutions extends far and wide, supporting communities, industries, small businesses and independents across the region. While they may well need to review their operations and programming to improve efficiency and impact, they remain vital contributors to the vibrant tapestry of voices in our city. Whether I attend their shows or not, I am thankful they are part of the landscape.
If all of these organizations simply disappeared with no fanfare do you know how many Canadians would care? A number so small as to approach zero. Fear and loathing in the upper reaches of the Toronto glitterati doesn’t even register
Thanks for stopping by. I wrote about this type of muddled thinking a couple of years ago:
The headline was: Talking past each other - Is "moral consistency" too much to ask from people who are emotionally involved?
The relevant part for your consideration:
One can’t help but think of Charles de Gaulle in 1940, prior to US Air Force & Royal Air Force dropping “nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 60 cities & killing more than half a million German citizens”:
“‘Nothing is lost for France.’ The French people could look to their empire and to the backing of Great Britain. ‘For France is not alone! She is not alone!’”
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where France would be a free nation today had the USAF and RAF not undertaken their three-year campaign. Whether or not you believe that the “killing of civilians” via carpet bombing was intentional in WWII, it involved a lot less care than what the IDF appears to be doing as it attempts to eradicate Hamas Terrorists from Israel’s doorstep. https://markmcqueen.substack.com/p/talking-past-each-other
Hogwash. As per that Nov/23 piece I shared with you:
We either support the right of nations to defend themselves or we don’t, whether it be from Nazi Germany, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, an armed and murderous militant group inside our own borders, or Hamas. The loss of civilian life in Gaza is painful to see, just as it is in Yemen and Syria, where up to 500,000 Muslims have perished in recent years. Or in China, where a million Muslim Uyghurs have been detained or worse since 2014.
Instead of talking past (shouting?) the rest of us, those who are marching in our streets to protest Jewish-owned businesses, or at an Israeli Consulate, need to help we non-aligned Canadians understand why Israel is being held to a different standard than, say, Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis Yemen? Why are you not demanding that CPPIB divest from China, for example, concurrent with the UofT Grad Students’ Union’s formal request that their school’s endowment exit all Israeli investments? Why are you not also calling for a “cease-fire” in front of 1151 West Georgia Street in Vancouver, home of the Honorary Consulate for Syria, when an estimated 18 Syrian children die each day?
While the charitable among us might simply say that people “forgot with the passage of time,” these clear double standards may well be anti-Semitism at play.
Most prominent anti-zionists were disgusted and condemned Saudi Arabia's starvation of Yemen. Today, Saudi Arabia and Israel are de facto allies through their defensive pacts with the United States. Equating China's forced sterilization campaign of the Uyguhr population to the unrelenting siege and genocide of Gaza, or the 59 year long occupation / apartheid of the Palestinian people is preposterous. Israel exercises sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank without granting its populations civic or democratic representation, and as such those occupied peoples have a right to armed resistance.
Thoughtful breakdown of the institutional funding paradox. The part about disbanding the committee after a democratic vote is wild becasue it undermines the entire model they deliberately built. Saw something similiar at a university board I served on where we invited donor input then got squeamish when they actually exercised it.
Your analysis, while carefully constructed, conveniently ignores the structural power inequities and political motivations that dictate how public services are administered in Ontario. You treat the financialization of the public sphere as an immutable law of nature, ignoring the disproportionate influence of capital and its permeation/intrusion into public realms that make little sense for rational markets to operate in.
You cite a struggling healthcare system as a logical justification for the province’s neglect of arts funding. This deliberately sidesteps the reality that this is a manufactured crisis. The provincial government has made deliberate policy choices to underfund healthcare and adjacent public services, starving the civic trust to force public institutions into the arms of private donors just to stay afloat.
The fact of the matter is that many other jurisdictions—domestically and internationally—fund their cultural institutions, transit, and healthcare adequately because they recognize them as a public good, not as commercial enterprises optimized for instrumental utility. Ask yourself: why is the AGO not on par with global institutions like the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum? Why is it not even the best gallery in Canada? (The Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, which operates with far stronger state backing and cultural protection, possesses a vastly superior curatorial layout and rigor).
The answer is the funding model. The AGO, forced to generate 75% of its revenue, is trapped in a cycle of soliciting "loud money." It must prioritize spectacle and donor appeasement over curatorial truth.
This is not a problem that corporate donorship can solve, because artistic freedom, counterculture, and intellectual rigor—the very things that make art worthy of pursuit—are fundamentally opposed to the demands of capital. By demanding that curators cater to the sensibilities of wealthy benefactors, the elites you protect seek to bend these institutions to their will, imparting a narrow, neoliberal perspective onto spaces that are supposed to challenge those exact paradigms and keep them in check.
If the dissenting views you dismiss were truly as marginal or "fringe" as you claim, there would not have been such a marked public outcry demanding the AGO disband its politically motivated committees. That outcry was not a fringe reaction; it was the public's immune response to the commodification of their heritage.
Let’s not pretend that the AGO’s current dependency on corporate sponsorship is an incontrovertible fact of life. It is the result of a deliberate, ideological choice by elites to colonize the last remaining vestiges of free expression and the public realm. When you ask curators to simply accept this, you aren't asking for pragmatism; you are demanding the surrender of their very ontology.
Thanks for those thoughtful perspectives. Two questions present themselves: 1) How should the Provincial government increase funding for the AGO? It has to either raise taxes, or take from some other corner of the Provincial budget. 2) The only evidence I’ve seen of “a marked public outcry” is an online petition signed by people who also happen (in the 90% overlapping range by my analysis, anyway) to oppose Israel’s handling of the Hamas attack of Oct 7th. That a couple of people quit a committee isn’t particularly newsworthy. That the Goldin piece in question isn’t seen to be part of her best work is not lost on me, nor the fact that many on that AGO Committee didn’t believe this was the right time for a Canadian institution to be adding yet another American work (instead of a worthy Canadian artist) to its already huge collection of same.
1) This is a false choice. You are framing the budget as a static zero-sum game to avoid discussing prioritization. The Ontario government regularly finds billions for 'corners' like the Highway 413 project or the relocation of the Ontario Science Centre—projects that serve specific development interests. Budgeting is not a math problem; it is a moral one. When the province chooses to fund a $10-billion highway while providing the second-lowest per-capita healthcare funding in Canada (according to the FAO), it isn't 'balancing' a budget; it is actively choosing to starve the public realm to subsidize private industry. Your question also assumes that 'Growth' can only happen through infrastructure and extraction. But cultural institutions ARE the infrastructure of the soul. By underfunding them, you aren't saving money, you are incurring a pseudo cultural deficit that makes the city less livable, less imaginative, and ultimately less valuable, even by your own economic metrics. This is further evidenced by the recent departure of Julian Cox, the chief curator. When the most renowned talent refuses to be affiliated with the AGO (facing a reputational crisis) you are incurring negative externalities invisible on the balance sheet.
2) You mention that the Goldin piece wasn't 'part of her best work.' That is a curatorial judgment. In a healthy institution, that judgment belongs to the curators, not the trustees. The fact that the Modern and Contemporary Curatorial Working Committee actually voted to acquire it, only to be blocked by a trustee-led campaign proves this wasn't an 'acquisition criteria' issue; it was a political veto. This is conclusion is further substantiated by the fact that two other co-acquirers, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, did not in fact face the same fate - it proves the exclusivity of this problem to AGO where it has shown a willingness to appease the donor class; not very different from the politics of our neighbours to our south. When capital starts to dominate and govern pretty well every facet of our lives, it is antithetical to democracy (and demos) itself.
3) Whether the petition signers are 90% or 10% aligned on a specific geopolitical issue is irrelevant to the fact that a senior curator (John Zeppetelli) and multiple committee members resigned in protest. If you add Julian Cox to the mix as I mentioned above, the defensive stance you've taken is becoming harder to justify. When professional curators (the very people whose expertise you rely on) quit because they believe the institution's integrity has been compromised by donor interference, that is the definition of a crisis. You are focusing on the 'who' of the protest to deflect the 'why' of the resignations. This is why your argument is best framed within a power structure lens - the same type of influence of capital also are deeply interlinked other political issues of today.
Bravo. Those who put their assets on the line get a voice. Period. The worthless bureaucrats who are uncomfortable can go back to the sidelines.
Our arts institutions are essential for showcasing a diversity of thought, perspective, and experience, and for bringing people together in shared spaces. They aren’t just for the 1% - they provide inspiration and aspiration to the artists who participate in the Riverdale Art Walk, to the musicians performing in local bars, and to the millions of tourists who visit our city. The network effect of our cultural institutions extends far and wide, supporting communities, industries, small businesses and independents across the region. While they may well need to review their operations and programming to improve efficiency and impact, they remain vital contributors to the vibrant tapestry of voices in our city. Whether I attend their shows or not, I am thankful they are part of the landscape.
Me too!
If all of these organizations simply disappeared with no fanfare do you know how many Canadians would care? A number so small as to approach zero. Fear and loathing in the upper reaches of the Toronto glitterati doesn’t even register
This is part of the challenge that gallery staff across the land must face, head-on.
Thanks for stopping by. I wrote about this type of muddled thinking a couple of years ago:
The headline was: Talking past each other - Is "moral consistency" too much to ask from people who are emotionally involved?
The relevant part for your consideration:
One can’t help but think of Charles de Gaulle in 1940, prior to US Air Force & Royal Air Force dropping “nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 60 cities & killing more than half a million German citizens”:
“‘Nothing is lost for France.’ The French people could look to their empire and to the backing of Great Britain. ‘For France is not alone! She is not alone!’”
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where France would be a free nation today had the USAF and RAF not undertaken their three-year campaign. Whether or not you believe that the “killing of civilians” via carpet bombing was intentional in WWII, it involved a lot less care than what the IDF appears to be doing as it attempts to eradicate Hamas Terrorists from Israel’s doorstep. https://markmcqueen.substack.com/p/talking-past-each-other
Hogwash. As per that Nov/23 piece I shared with you:
We either support the right of nations to defend themselves or we don’t, whether it be from Nazi Germany, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, an armed and murderous militant group inside our own borders, or Hamas. The loss of civilian life in Gaza is painful to see, just as it is in Yemen and Syria, where up to 500,000 Muslims have perished in recent years. Or in China, where a million Muslim Uyghurs have been detained or worse since 2014.
Instead of talking past (shouting?) the rest of us, those who are marching in our streets to protest Jewish-owned businesses, or at an Israeli Consulate, need to help we non-aligned Canadians understand why Israel is being held to a different standard than, say, Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis Yemen? Why are you not demanding that CPPIB divest from China, for example, concurrent with the UofT Grad Students’ Union’s formal request that their school’s endowment exit all Israeli investments? Why are you not also calling for a “cease-fire” in front of 1151 West Georgia Street in Vancouver, home of the Honorary Consulate for Syria, when an estimated 18 Syrian children die each day?
While the charitable among us might simply say that people “forgot with the passage of time,” these clear double standards may well be anti-Semitism at play.
Most prominent anti-zionists were disgusted and condemned Saudi Arabia's starvation of Yemen. Today, Saudi Arabia and Israel are de facto allies through their defensive pacts with the United States. Equating China's forced sterilization campaign of the Uyguhr population to the unrelenting siege and genocide of Gaza, or the 59 year long occupation / apartheid of the Palestinian people is preposterous. Israel exercises sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank without granting its populations civic or democratic representation, and as such those occupied peoples have a right to armed resistance.