Certificates of Origin

A valuable reminder from CARFAC:

Don’t get stuck at the border because you waited until the last minute to get your paperwork. Planning ahead will make the process much smoother and save you a lot of stress.

Give yourself at least a month to be sure you have everything you need. If you will be paid for any service you provide while outside Canada, you need to apply several months in advance to get the proper visa.

• Certificates of Canadian Origin are for the process of returning artwork to Canada so you don’t need to pay GST on your work when they come back. These take two weeks plus shipping to be processed.
• Additional forms are often required to allow artwork to enter a foreign country, especially if the total value of the artwork that’s travelling is more than $2500. These also take a couple weeks or more.
• An information sheet about taking artwork over the border is available for CARFAC members.
• If you are travelling with your work, you may want to get an International Association of Art card that grants entry to many museums in Western Europe and elsewhere. IAA cards are available to CARFAC members only. More about the IAA card.

For more information visit the CARFAC website.

A new analysis of US Census Bureau data indicates that American art students have a mere 1-in-10 chance of becoming working artists. And that’s not all:

Most surprising was the lack of overlap between working artists and arts graduates. In the United States, 40 percent of working artists do not have a bachelors degree in any field. Only 16 percent of working artists have arts related bachelors degrees. Though arts graduates may acquire additional opportunities and skills from attending art school, arts graduates are likely to graduate with significant student loan debt, which makes working as an artist difficult, if not impossible. … Although there are 1.2 million working artists over the age of 25 in this country, there are only 200,000 working artists with arts-related bachelors degrees. The majority of working artists have median earnings of $30,621, but the small percentage of working artists with bachelors degrees in the arts have median earnings of $36,105.

Alexis Clements is an arts journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently working on a book about the role and value of the arts in US. Learn more about her work at www.alexisclements.com. She reacts:

Most reports about artists that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a fair number) that are based on quantitative data are pretty fuzzy when it comes to the thing that many artists would love to know: How much money do artists make from their creative work?Why is the data so imprecise? Because almost everything about the ways that artists work seems to defy typical practices for collecting labor and earnings statistics. By and large, it appears that labor statistics, like the ones collected in the American Community Survey, generally assume that most workers have a single or primary job that provides the largest share of their earnings and that job is comprised of a bounded set of tasks or modes of earning money — for example, if you say you are an auto mechanic, the assumption is that you earn most of your money fixing cars. But as many artists know, when you say you’re an artist, how you earn your money can and often does come from a wide array of sources — it could be sales or commissions, it could be royalty payments, fees for presenting work, or teaching in various forms, which many artists lump into their occupation as an artist. … All of this makes it really tough to understand what income really means for an artist when you’re trying to isolate their artistic earnings.

Source: Andrew Sullivan's The Dish.

The Loving Mother

The Crawl Expands

Why Pay Artists?

Funny or Sad?

Canadian Anti-Spam Flow Chart

Click here to view the chart on the Canada Council website.
This version is impossible to read.

This is from the Canada Council. I have no clue what "7" is. 

I assume step 7 is to "send it."

Visual Clichés

In the Atlantic magazine, Michael Silverberg writes:

I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.” Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual cliches. Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says, and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.