Letter to Mr. Robert Sirman, Director, Canada Council

The following letter from Eugene Knapik will be in the mail tomorrow morning, addressed to Mr. Robert Sirman, Director of the Canada Council:

Dear Mr. Sirman,

It has come to my attention that your Visual Arts Section has adopted a new policy to stop accepting 35 mm film slides as support material, as well as the adoption of a new standard, a jpeg image with a maximum file size of .5 mb, for viewing both over the internet and in the jury room. This policy is inappropriate, and I am writing to ask you to change it.

This policy is inappropriate for reasons that are obvious to me and to others I have spoken with in the arts community. Many, many – I will say most - works of art simply cannot be judged with such a crude representation that can offer up only the most general sense of the work. I hope that looking at images is not going to be merely an afterthought in making granting decisions. That would be a sad day indeed.

Let’s not lower the bar – let’s raise it. Let’s give artists a chance to show their work at a reasonable level of detail. It is the only fair approach.

Obviously, we are all seeing the remarkable growth in use of the internet in all our lives, and I can understand Council decision-makers wanting to be modern or hip. However, the decision to disallow high-resolution photography does nothing more than obscure images submitted in the hope of fair appraisal. I can support a decision to require electronic files, if they can include high-resolution files in TIFF format. This is only reasonable.

Please take this opportunity to intervene and revisit this decision today. I see this as a matter of basic respect for Canadian artists.