A close-up of Canada's 10-dollar bill. Photo: Bank of Canada.
$3,903 for a retrospective at a large Canadian art gallery. $923 for being part of a three-person exhibition at a mid-budget cultural space. $2,077 for a major stand-alone performance at a small arts centre. And $316 for a half-day or shorter artist presentation anywhere.
These are some of the minimum payments artists in Canada can expect in 2020 according to the new CARFAC-RAAV Minimum Recommended Fee Schedule. The new schedule—the first major overhaul since 2007—came into effect January 1, 2020, and includes two per cent annual increases to 2023.
“The [fee schedule] is updated regularly through negotiation and usage, with annual increases reflecting changes in the cost of living,” says a CARFAC-RAAV announcement. And the latest standard, an email states, includes “major changes to royalties and language related to performance and media arts, some reproduction rates simplified, and new rates for jury participation and writing.”
The new fee schedule, as with its other recent editions, is extensive. Overall, it covers roughly 50 forms of presentation and artist activities. These include reproducing artworks in moving images on the internet; artist fees for exhibitions at commercial fairs where the artwork is not primarily for sale; and half- and full-day art-installation fees; among other items.
Also included are the baseline exhibition fees that CARFAC has been issuing since 1968 and which became protected under Canadian copyright law in 1988.
The new artist and artwork fees are often scaled across three different sizes of art centres. Category III is for presenters with operating budgets more than $1 million; Category II, for presenters with operating budgets of $500,001 to $1,000,000; and Category I, for presenters with operating budgets of less than $500,000.
Not fully included in these baseline fees are the National Gallery of Canada and some major Quebec museums (such as the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), which negotiate separate agreements with CARFAC-RAAV in certain instances under the Status of the Artist Act.
