Viewpoint: Artists’ resale rights are a human right — but not in Canada

By Rupert Nuttle

On Oct. 7, 2015, less than a year before her death, a video of the Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook shows her sitting on a stone staircase in downtown Ottawa, wearing a colourful knit sweater.

“I pray every day,” she says, lifting her arms and looking skyward, “to restart my life.”

Her speech is jumpy and slurred. It clearly takes effort. “I been having a hard time lately,” she says. She looks down at her knees and puts her fists to her forehead.

“A hard time with what?” a man asks from off-camera.

“My life!” she shoots back, looking right at him.

A decade earlier, Pootoogook had catapulted from her home in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, to global art-world fame. In 2006, she won the Sobey Art Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious art prizes, for her delicate coloured-pencil renderings of life in the North.

Within a year, she was the face of a new Inuit art movement. Major public institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, purchased her drawings, as did private collectors — who saw lasting investments in her stark pictures.

Yet she lived rough at the end of her life, despite the commercial success of her work. While her drawings were valued at thousands of dollars, she moved in and out of women’s shelters, panning just enough change for cigarettes and booze. Last fall, her body washed up in the Rideau River in Lowertown, a death Ottawa Police are treating as suspicious. She was 47 years old.

To prevent this kind of disparity between artistic and financial success, some 96 countries — including Australia, the United Kingdom, Russia and the Philippines — enforce copyright laws called “artists’ resale rights,” which guarantee a significant share of revenue to artists every time their works are resold (similar to a royalty for musicians).

Canada does not uphold these rights. Instead, this country operates an exploitative market, in which professional artists — most of whom subsist below the poverty line — don’t see their income grow in tandem with their careers.

Even those who gain international stature often still struggle to make ends meet while watching the prices for their work take off.

This dynamic has a disproportionate impact on Indigenous artists, who frequently hail from remote communities and have limited means. “You have art dealers who go into the North and onto reserves, buy up significant amounts of Indigenous art, and resell it immediately for two or three or four times the cost,” said Darrah Teitel, an advocate for resale rights with Canadian Artists’ Representation, a national union for artists.

In an oft-cited example from 2001, when a work by the Inuk artist Kenojuak Ashevak came up for auction, it sold for $58,650 — a far cry from the $24 she’d made when it was first purchased in 1960. At the time of the auction, Ashevak was 74 and had been well-established as an Inuit art pioneer. Nonetheless, she received nothing from the resale.

As the market for Canadian Indigenous art keeps growing, stories like Ashevak’s are becoming more common. For almost a decade , Teitel’s organization has campaigned for resale rights legislation, with limited success. CARFAC (the acronym includes the group’s French title) proposes that artists should receive a five-per-cent cut on every resale of their work. According to Teitel, this proposal has been met with only positive responses — but has seen very little in terms of concrete action.

This year, the Copyright Act of Canada will come up for review. Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly needs to make artists’ resale rights a priority. Failing to do so will continue to deny this country’s artists an important stream of income, and further entrench Canada as a global art market backwater.

More importantly, Canada’s lack of resale rights laws will continue to rob Indigenous artists, not only of profits, but of the respect and humanity they so richly deserve.

If Pootoogook had the option of receiving payments from the resale of her work, she’d certainly have had a better shot at overcoming hard times. I can’t help but think this groundbreaking artist might still be with us.