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Ireland May End Artists’ Tax-Free Status

Ireland is going to review its tax policy that allows artists to not pay any taxes. The review is in response to widespread public anger that “millionaires in the music business and other fields have been using relief schemes that allow them, legitimately, to avoid paying any tax on their earnings. The tax free scheme for writers, artists and musicians was introduced more than 30 years ago by former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, an arts patron who was then finance minister. The scheme, unique to Ireland, was intended to show how the country valued artistic and creative talent, as well as being of practical help to struggling artists.”

Plan: Create Iowa Public Radio System

A report endorsed by Iowa’s three public radio licensees recommends that the state’s three major stations combine into a statewide system. “The study found that lack of cooperation and overlapping broadcast areas cause the university stations to lag behind pubradio’s national performance in audience and fundraising. ‘Each has probably reached its full potential as a totally independent university station. Public radio in Iowa has not reached its full potential, however’.”

Shoulda Been An (Oscar) Contenda

Two-hundred-and-sixty-seven movies have qualified for this year’s Oscar race. “The number is within the average range of films that have been in contention during the past half-decade. Last year, 254 films were considered, down from 279 in 2002. The numbers were lower in 2001 and 2000, when 248 and 242 pics, respectively, were eligible. The recent numbers are down significantly from the highs of the 1940s and ’50s, when films considered annually numbered in the 400s.”

The Big Business Of Investing In Art

“With its yearly sales now reaching an estimated $10 billion in the United States alone, art has quite literally become big business. While money invested in the stock market’s S&P 500 Index — a conservative bet on Wall Street’s top 500 companies — has earned an annualized 11 percent return over the past decade, that same money sunk into the contemporary art market would have produced a whopping 29 percent return.”

Predicting What Tickets You’ll Buy

John Elliot is getting attention for his direct marketing analysis of arts audiences and how likely they are to buy tickets for a given show. He has “detailed computer analysis of consumers’ purchasing patterns and statistical models to track down the most likely ticket buyers for cultural district shows. His secret weapon? A database of 425,000 households based on 14 years’ worth of ticket sales.”

The Arts Audience: Last-Minute Buyers

The ticket-buying habits of arts groups are changing. “Across the board, concerts in general, everyone is waiting longer to buy tickets than five years ago. It used to be, you had a window that started six weeks out. Now, that’s shrunk to three or four weeks, and you see a lot of sales in the week before the concert occurs. The trend creates several problems for performing-arts groups…”

Intellectuals’ Rockin’ Eve

The Modern Language Association has been meeting in Philadelphia this week. “Founded in 1883, the association was little noticed until the 1980s, when teachers of trendy new disciplines – African American studies, women’s studies, queer theory – challenged traditional scholarship and brought the ‘culture war’ into the ivory tower. Ever since, the group has been criticized for pushing the envelope too far, for being too leftist, too socialist, too orthodox, for generating reams of scholarly papers with little practical application. There’s a reason it tilts progressive: Humanities professors tend to be liberal and to push at boundaries. Conservatives and libertarians are more likely to go into business administration, economics and the law.”

Helping Britain’s Abused Public Art

A new award is being launched in Britain for public sculpture. It’s intended to focus good will on the country’s public art – much of which has been vandalized or neglected. “The background is a dismal inventory, gradually being revealed as the association compiles a national register of all the public sculptures in the UK, of the ignored, abused or trashed works of art scattered across the country.”