“Since its introduction in the mid-1990s, the UK National Lottery has made a lot of poor people slightly poorer while equipping Arts Councils to enrich an arts sector that disproportionately serves the better-off. It is not hard to picture an old woman applying coin edge to scratch card, with no more chance of winning the jackpot than of stepping inside the gallery she has helped to build. Can we still claim that the arts are a ‘good cause’ when ill-spent money is increasingly used like this?”
Blog
Toronto Symphony Posts Surplus Of $2.3 Million (!)
“Although the TSO has been in the black for many years, the surplus for 2017-18 is significant. After many years of small, slow declines in ticket revenue, the organization posted a 17 per cent rise in ticket sales over the 2016-17 season. Subscription revenue has been steady, but revenue from single-ticket sales last season was up 26 per cent. This is a remarkable accomplishment, largely due to interim CEO Gary Hanson, a veteran orchestra manager.”
With String Quartets In A Brewery, NC Classical Radio Station Courts New Listeners
“Organized by WDAV in Davidson, and held at a brewery in Charlotte, the quarterly Small Batch Concert Series has attracted standing-room-only crowds of more than 200 people for its four concerts to date” — a turnout “much bigger” than previous station events, says the general manager, who adds that at every concert he encounters people who didn’t know that metro Charlotte even had a full-time classical radio station.
New NHS Program Uses Dance To Help The Elderly Avoid Falls
“Dance to Health started with a hunch: that the arts have the potential to deliver health improvement more effectively and more cost-effectively than the NHS. We needed a major health challenge that the arts might solve. We lighted upon older people falling over.”
Arts World Wrestles With What To Do With Saudi Arabia Links
MBS’s cultural scope sears far deeper than the upcoming initiative, with the Smithsonian, UK Museum of Natural History, and Sotheby’salso facing their next steps given existing program backed by the Saudi Arabian government. The financial reach of Saudi Arabia has deeply permeated the art world, with many institutions embedded in years-long cultural and fiscal relationships.
Theatre’s Business Model Is Broken. So New Support Has To Be Found
Speaking at the Theatres Trust Conference 2018 in London, Emma Stenning said: “We can’t be subsidy-reliant charities any longer. We have to look at our buildings as our principle assets. We have to keep saying how can it carry on giving back to the business.” She explained that the Bristol Old Vic previously made a £60,000 profit on its catering business, which is expected to increase to about £300,000 over the next 18 months, following the theatre’s refurbishment.
A Remote Irish Opera Company That Shouldn’t Work, But, Improbably Does
“I was once told by the then chairman of a leading American opera company that the reason Wexford has rightly survived is because from the outset its rationale was plain wrong. He was right: the dream by a small group of local people, including a GP, a hotelier and a postman, in the early 1950s, of bringing international singers to a remote corner of Ireland to present rarely performed operas, wouldn’t even get past the first page of a modern-day feasibility study.”
The Saucer Has Landed! Taiwan Opens Its New National Arts Center
Part landscape, part architecture, the 1.51-million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts blurs the boundaries between indoors and out, solid and void. Floating at one end of a 116-acre park that had been a military base before the project began 12 years ago, the $280-million complex brings together four performance spaces under one enormous roof and a fifth one on top of it.
NY State Opens Investigation Into MoviePass
“MoviePass’ business model was not sustainable because there was no reasonable basis to believe MoviePass could monetize the model to a degree that could be maintained before being too buried in debt to survive,” shareholder Jeffrey Braxton argued in his suit, which seeks class action status. A significant turning point for the company came on July 27, when Helios disclosed in a regulatory filing that it couldn’t make payments to its merchants, and that resulted in a service interruption. The company’s stock plummeted, losing 96% of its value since that SEC filing.
How Do You Get Art Closer To The Grass Roots Community? Experiment In Public
BAC operates using a practice model called Scratch, which involves sharing an idea publicly at an early stage of its development, getting feedback and using it to get the idea on to the next stage. We scratch everything. It might sound unfinished, but it actually gives an artist the freedom to creatively go for what they want to achieve, potentially fail, learn and go again – repeating this cycle until they get to where they need to be.