my work
No Panel Is Vetting Banksy
Ottawa's arts funding runs on peer assessment committees, and the criteria they score against are legible, defensible, and consensus-built. That's not a flaw jurors could fix by trying harder. It's what a committee is.
Nobody gave Banksy a grant. Nobody gave Ai Weiwei one either — the government he's most associated with spent years surveilling him, demolishing his studio, and holding him without charge. Neither artist built a career by clearing a peer assessment committee. One built his by staying anonymous and painting on other people's property without permission. The other built his by being the kind of dissident a state cultural bureaucracy exists to screen out. If either had submitted a proposal to a municipal arts jury under their own name, in advance, describing what they planned to do, it is difficult to imagine the file surviving the room.
That's not a knock on the jurors. It's a description of what a jury is for.
What the process actually screens for
Ottawa runs arts funding through peer assessment committees — panels of working artists and cultural professionals who review applications and score them against published criteria. Arts Ottawa, which administers grant streams like the ARTiculate Project Grant out of the Shenkman Arts Centre, describes its own standard plainly: proposals are judged on artistic relevance, viability, and impact on the community. The City of Ottawa's separate Cultural Funding stream runs the same basic model — independent review, then a committee meeting, under a conflict-of-interest policy that requires jurors to declare any relationship with an applicant before the room even opens.
// what gets scored
- Artistic relevance of the proposed project
- Viability — can the applicant actually deliver it
- Impact on the community
- Completed budget, matched revenues to expenses
- Support material demonstrating prior accomplishment
Every one of those criteria is reasonable. Every one of them is also a filter for the kind of project that can be described, budgeted, and justified before it exists. Viability rewards a track record. Community impact rewards work that can name its audience in advance. A completed, balanced budget rewards a proposal legible enough to cost out. None of that is a defect in the design — it's what you'd build if the job was to responsibly allocate a fixed public budget across a community of working artists. It is not what you'd build if the job was to find the next Banksy.
A jury selects. It doesn't discover.
The Wikipedia summary of the peer jury model, drawn from how Canadian arts councils describe their own practice, is unusually candid about this: a jury brings expertise an agency doesn't have in-house, and its function is to choose among what's submitted — not to catch what wasn't. That's a fine tool for distributing a grants budget across a discipline. It is structurally the wrong tool for identifying work that turns out, years later, to have mattered — because the work that ends up mattering most is disproportionately the work that didn't ask permission first.
Two different jobs, one label
What peer assessment is good at
Sustaining a local arts ecosystem. Getting working artists a fair, conflict-declared shot at a public budget. Producing outputs a city can report: grants disbursed, disciplines represented, projects completed.
What it was never built for
Identifying work with lasting cultural or political consequence before that consequence exists. That kind of work is defined by breaking the very criteria — permission, budget, predictable audience — a committee has to score against.
The trouble isn't that Ottawa runs a peer assessment model. Most Canadian arts funders do, for good reason — it's harder to rig than a single official's discretion, and it puts the judgment in the hands of people who actually work in the field. The trouble is when a funding program gets sold, implicitly, as a discovery mechanism — as the city's way of finding and backing its most important artists — when what it actually is, structurally, is a distribution mechanism for a fixed budget among applicants who can produce a fundable proposal. Those are different jobs. Conflating them sets an expectation the process cannot meet, and then quietly disappoints everyone when it doesn't.
What I'd actually change
I'm not proposing Ottawa defund peer assessment, or pretend a municipal grants office can replicate what an anonymous street artist or a dissident under state surveillance does. Neither of those is a realistic municipal program. What I'd change is the framing and the reporting.
Stop measuring the arts funding program on outputs — grants disbursed, dollars allocated, applicants served — as if that were evidence of cultural outcome. It's evidence of process, not impact. If council wants to claim the program produces significant art, it should say what "significant" means and report against that, honestly, including the years it comes up short. And if a portion of the budget is meant to take on real risk — work that might fail, offend, or simply not fit a scoring rubric — build that as its own explicit, smaller stream with its own criteria, instead of asking one committee-scored process to be both a safety net for working artists and a discovery engine for genius. It currently tries to be both and is honestly evaluated as neither.
Ottawa doesn't need a jury that can spot the next Banksy. It needs to stop implying it has one.
Sources
- Arts Ottawa — Creation and Development grant stream, assessment criteria (artsottawa.ca/creationdevelopment)
- City of Ottawa — Cultural Funding, "Application process and policies" (ottawa.ca)
- City of Ottawa — Cultural Funding, "Information for applicants," conflict-of-interest policy (ottawa.ca)
- City of Ottawa — "Interested in becoming a juror?" peer assessment model description (ottawa.ca)
- Wikipedia — "Peer jury process"
Subject: Re: Arts Ottawa — three asks, one condition from Arts Ottawa
I'm an amateur painter. I've applied for grants purely to get wall space for my own work, and I've been turned down every time. So I don't come to this as a politician reading a sector brief — I come to it as someone who has been on the losing end of exactly the system you're describing.
I try to distinguish between commitments that sound good and commitments that actually change outcomes for someone like me. So here's my honest reaction to your three asks:
1. Cultural Infrastructure Reserve Fund — I support treating cultural space as infrastructure rather than a one-off grant line. But infrastructure funds tend to get captured by the institutions with the staff capacity to apply for them. If the City does this, I'd want a stated share reserved for low-barrier, individual-artist access — not just renovations to buildings run by organizations that already know how to write a grant application.
2. Permanent funding tied to inflation and population growth — I'm skeptical of automatic formula increases without attached outcome measures. "Funding grows every year" isn't the same as "more artists get shown." I'd want the increase tied to measurable access metrics — number of new/first-time grantees, turnaround time on applications, rejection reasons published — not just a bigger budget doing the same thing it does now.
3. Coordinating arts governance through the 2027 Governance Review and finishing the Municipal Culture Plan — this one I support without much hesitation. Fragmented governance is exactly the kind of structural problem I think Council should be fixing, and a finished, published Culture Plan is a measurable deliverable, not a promise.
So: two of three, plus a condition on the third. I'd genuinely welcome the chance to talk this through — particularly the access-for-individual-artists piece, since that's the gap I've experienced directly and don't see addressed in the paper.
Peter Karwacki
Candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)
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