Writers Union: Canadian Writers Earn 27 Percent Less Than Three Years Ago

When the Writers’ Union of Canada recently surveyed its members about their incomes, the results were sobering: an average writer made $9,380 a year from his or her writing. That’s 27 per cent less than what writers made three years ago, and a whopping 78 per cent less than they made in 1998.  The report comes in stark contrast to the glossy literary awards season, where champagne flows and prizes that sound lucrative are given out, culminating with the $100,000 Giller Prize.

Notorious Art Forger Talks About Ethics

Wolfgang Beltracchi, convicted in 2011 of painting and selling a series of 14 forgeries that fetched a total of $45 million. He compares himself favorably to the likes of Jeff Koons: “I painted individual paintings and I never replicated them, they were always unique pieces from a certain context, a certain period, with a certain technique, with a certain narrative. These artists — Jeff Koons, but also Ai Weiwei, and there are many more — are promoted by great dealer and everyone earns a lot of money. It is trade, but it has no originality.”

New Report Commissioned By Macron Urges France To Return Colonial Art To Africa

The French historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr will present their 108-page study to President Macron this Friday, 23 November. In it they argue that the complete transfer of property back to Africa and not the long-term loan of objects to African museums should be the general rule for works taken in the colonial period unless it can be proven that these objects were acquired “legitimately”.

Stolen Picasso Found In Romanian Forest — Whoops! Never Mind, It Was A Hoax

Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin was one of seven paintings stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal in 2012 by a group of Romanian thieves and thought to have been burned in a stove by the ringleader’s mother. On Monday, news broke that Tete d’Arlequin had been found in rural Romania: later, “it emerged it was totally too good to be true, part of an elaborate and carefully staged piece of performance art by a radical Belgian theatre company.”

After Seven Seasons, Jessica Lang Dance To Shut Down

While Lang’s career as a choreographer has been going well, things (mostly money) for her company have been as difficult as for any small, independent dance troupe. “You have to raise so much money, the smaller companies don’t have enough staff, and Jessica was running the company for the last seven years without a day off,” said Lang’s manager. The group will disband in April, after completing a final tour.

We’re Less Free, Less Creative When Someone Is Watching Us

We know that surveillance has a chilling effect on freedom. People change their behavior when they live their lives under surveillance. They are less likely to speak freely and act individually. They self-censor. They become conformist. This is obviously true for government surveillance, but is true for corporate surveillance as well. We simply aren’t as willing to be our individual selves when others are watching.

Canadian Literary Prize Canceled After Finalists Discover Amazon Is A Sponsor

The CA$5,000 (£3,000) Prix littéraire des collégiens, running since 2003, is intended to promote Québécois literature and is decided by a jury of hundreds of students who select their winner from a selection of five works of fiction written in French by Canadian authors. But after this year’s finalists, the writers Lula Carballo, Dominique Fortier, Karoline Georges, Kevin Lambert and Jean-Christophe Réhel, discovered that Amazon Canada would be the prize’s new principal sponsor, they wrote to Le Devoir urging organisers to reconsider.

Nationalism Is Rearing Up Again And It Needs Hate To Survive. How To Transcend It?

If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest. Climate change, perhaps?