Category: issues

The much-maligned Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, which presents a popular summer slate of shows featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet, has balanced its budget for fiscal 2005 several months after a large part of its board and executive team turned over in the wake of a fiscal-mismanagement scandal. Special gifts amounting to $700,000 were arranged by the new team over the past few months to put the center in the black. (For the record, that’s $700,000 more in major gifts than the previous administration managed to raise in the last three years.) However, SPAC isn’t out of the woods yet: the center says it will need to raise an additional $10 million to bring its endowment back up to healthy levels.

The over-budget behind-schedule Miami Performing Arts Center is negotiating to sell naming rights to the Center for $20 million. “Representatives are in negotiations with a corporation and two individuals interested in buying naming rights for the downtown facility that’s due to be completed Aug. 4 and open two months later.”

Last week 148 countries voted to approve a UNESCO Treaty on Cultural Diversity. The U.S. and Israel were the only no votes. “One major problem for the United States in the 21st century will surely be our lack of ability to grapple with the proliferation of international instruments and regimes, like the Treaty of Cultural Diversity. These treaties are key tools for those who want to constrain American influence in the world. In UNESCO, the United States was at a huge disadvantage, as was our hard-working Ambassador Louise Oliver, who fought heroically to change the result.”

The city of Edinburgh is planning to put a wireless system in place so tourists could get “wireless tours” of the city on their mobile phones and hand-held computers. “The service, which could be in place as early as next summer, would help tourists pre-plan their visits and also provide regular messages updating them about events taking place in the capital.”

Canadian artists are lobbying the federal government to increase arts funding to a rate of $5 per capita per year. The group has asked that any new arts money be directed to the Canada Council for the Arts, which supports 2,200 arts organizations and more than 2,000 individual artists. The council invests $156 million in the arts each year; but the coalition wants to double that amount. An increasing number of arts organizations and individual artists are requesting money from the council as Canada’s artistic community gets more diverse.”

It has taken 27 years to get a performing arts center built in Miami. The building is still under construction, late, and $100 million over budget. Designing the project was a particularly public process. “The competition process was very unusual. We moved a whole design team into the host hotel for nearly a week. We had one of the conference rooms downstairs as our design studio, we moved our desks, our lamps, our materials, our supplies, and essentially designed the building in front of the community. It was almost completely open to the public.”

Arts backers in Kansas City say they’re going ahead with plans to build a $326-million performing arts center designed by Moshe Safdie. The project has been in the planning since spring 2002. “The board of the center has approved groundbreaking for fall 2006 contingent upon reaching an interim funding goal of $45 million prior to Feb.1, 2006. The plan calls for two 1,600-seat halls, one for symphonic music, the other for opera and ballet. Backers have raised $228.5 million so far, leaving them $97.5 million short of their goal.”

Sunday, the New York Times ran a story about NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg’s generous personal support of the arts. But “oddly omitted from the article are any comments from the major arts advocates in the city, including those from the Alliance for the Arts and the New York City Arts Coalition, who have not been shy about expressing their disappointment with the Bloomberg administration for having an arts expense budget lower than it was during the final fiscal year that began under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”

Greg Stielstra, senior marketing director for the Book Group at Zondervan, one of the world’s leading publishers of Christian books, “argues passionately that traditional mass marketing, which seeks to sell products and services to everyone, is no longer effective at selling anything to anyone. The societal influences that allowed mass marketing to prosper have disappeared, rendering mass marketing ineffective. New circumstances have created an opportunity for a different marketing approach.”

Here it is the last week of October, and this is the first we here at ArtsJournal have heard of the thing. “Apparently the celebration has been held every year since 1993. Organizers believed a monthlong national celebration would give fellow Americans the opportunity to explore new facets of the arts and humanities in their lives. Presumably they had thoroughly explored the old ones. More than likely, though, they saw the arts as decorative adjuncts to life. Interesting — informative, even — but not essential.”