Category: issues

Arts supporters have a plan to rescue an underused concert hall in Bournemouth, England. “Ambitiously billed as ‘Bournemouth’s Guggenheim’ after the famous art gallery with sites in New York and Bilbao, the centre will provide a home for Dance South West, the Big Little Theatre Company, the education and contemporary music arms of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the town’s music competitions festival among other creative activities.”

Only three years after it opened, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center is struggling to make ends meet. “Hobbled by a paltry endowment, the Kimmel still is not operating with a balanced budget. The last fiscal year ended with a $2.5 million deficit on a $32 million budget, and Kimmel leaders, after predicting that the current season would be their first in the black, now say their hopes of that happening are dimming.”

Did Scotland’s politicians waste the momentum and creative good will wrought by the city’s year as the European Capital of Culture? That’s what the country’s creative community believes, says a new study. “Research into the cultural impact of the event in 1990 which brought Luciano Pavarotti to the city and generated up to £14m for the local economy reveals policy-makers being blamed for an exodus of talent and concentrating on quotas rather than quality.”

Seven arts journalists have been chosen 2005 Fellows for the University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. A committee of six journalists chose the Fellows from an international pool of approximately 70 applicants from Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Nigeria, Romania and the United States.

Ireland is going to release the names of artists who have benefited from the country’s tax breaks for artists. “Disclosure would reveal that the Revenue considers the works of the artists to be original and creative and to have cultural merit. There is also significant public interest in ensuring maximum openness regarding public expenditure, particularly where there may be a perceived lack of transparency in the public body’s procedures and criteria.”

Singapore is a country with a reputation for economic success, but little in the way of a creative side. In the last decade, the government has sought to change that, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in arts and culture, but somehow, the results still seem strangely stilted and authoritarian. More importantly, it may be flatly impossible for a truly creative environment to be nurtured in a country as repressive as Singapore.

The sociological and national tensions between the British and Irish go back hundreds of years, but so does Britain’s obsession with Irish culture, literature, art and music. The uneasy balancing act of the UK’s Irish population is getting a close look this year at London’s National Portrait Gallery, “surveying visual representations of the artistic, literary, dramatic and political influence exercised in Victorian London by Irish incomers, determined to make their mark. Culturally fashionable Irishness was not just the result of rampant Celtic Tigerism over the past decade and a half; it has, apparently, a long-established pedigree.”

It’s been a banner year in Minneapolis for both the Guthrie Theater, which is preparing to open a huge new riverfront home, and the Minnesota Orchestra, which has been getting rave reviews for its new Beethoven CD and recent European tour. So arts observers in the Twin Cities were stunned recently when State Representative Marty Seifert (a Republican from rural western Minnesota) proposed a bill which would cap the salaries of Guthrie director Joe Dowling and orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä at $115,000, effectively turning both organizations into non-entities on the national and international arts scene. Seifert’s bill died in committee, but he’s vowed to try again.

“The advent of online ticket buying and automated phone services has made the ticket-selling business more cost-effective for the likes of Ticketmaster and easier for the consumer than ever before. Yet those pesky tack-on fees aren’t getting any lower. Like fees to use automated teller machines, ticket fees might be taken for granted. But what seems like petty change in the grand scope of things can really start adding up.”

Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts has managed to stay in the black in its second year of operation, but there’s still plenty to worry about. The center’s hoped-for endowment is still incomplete, and media mega-giant Clear Channel Productions is preparing to mount some serious competition to the Kimmel’s moneymaking Broadway musical series. On top of that, the Philadelphia Orchestra recently released a report saying that the center’s main concert hall needs a complete acoustical overhaul. And finally, with multiple big arts organizations in the city already in the midst of major fund drives, the Kimmel risks “donor fatigue” if it asks for too much too quickly.