Category: issues

“There’s a simple truth about marketing arts and culture,” writes Andrew Taylor. “Audiences don’t buy arts and cultural events. They can’t. The experience doesn’t exist until well after they’ve made their purchase decision. Instead, when they are deciding to give their money or time, audiences are ‘buying’ an expectation, an assumption, a hazy feeling of what that experience might hold. Since audiences can’t buy the cultural event, why do so many arts organizations spend all of their energy selling it?…”

“The endowment announced this week the distribution of $57,958,600 to not-for-profit national, regional, state, and local organizations across the country, funding projects in the categories of arts on radio and television, folk arts infrastructure, heritage and preservation, learning in the arts, and state and regional partnerships. The NEA’s budget for the year is $122.5 million.”

A controversial motion passed recently by the Toronto City Council to change the governance of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts, has raised concerns that it amounts to a takeover by primary tenant CanStage.” The center’s six other, smaller resident tenants charge that their survival would be in doubt under the new arrangement.

“After a season of ‘financial suicide’ at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, the co-owner of the troubled facility is appealing to Vancouver theatre-goers to tell him what kind of programming they’d like to see. ‘Most things haven’t worked in terms of audiences even though we’ve offered a huge variety’.”

Italy has a new political party. “The Party of Beauty’s manifesto is simple: stop destroying Italy’s landscape with uncontrolled development and stop inappropriate new building in the cities. “We have got to protect the identity of places”, said Mr Sgarbi, who is well known to the Italians as an art historian and tv pundit. “We have to give this battle some political bite. I am realistic about the number of people likely to go for us, but…”

“Cox Enterprises Inc., which owns nearly half of The Daytona Beach News-Journal, has sued the newspaper’s board of directors, accusing them of wasting $13 million for naming rights to a community arts center in Daytona Beach. The lawsuit seeks to stop the transaction and return the money to the newspaper, or have Cox’s ownership share bought out. Cox also wants unspecified damages and prior approval for any similar deals in the future.”

It’s been a rough couple of years for the business of being an arts organization. But in Denver, at least, the tough times are decidedly over. Ticket sales and memberships are up in dramatic fashion in the first quarter of 2004.

How to support the arts and solve funding problems? The answer is not just to talk about about the economic benefits and social goods that can accrue. “Put another way, the Medicis weren’t asking Michelangelo why this was good for business. Unfortunately, that was the almost exclusive approach of summit participants, perhaps because so few artists and other creative types were in evidence. Modern Medicis should take note.”

“Fifty-five of Scotland’s best-known musicians, authors and artists have signed an open letter to the country’s First Minister in which they argue that ‘a void’ has opened up where an arts strategy should exist. The signatories include the composer laureate Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, authors Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith and Alasdair Gray, and opera singer Jane Irwin. Dozens of theatre directors, poets, critics and administrators have also put their name to the letter, which represents an unprecedented revolt against government arts policy.”

“Politicians have to give up the idea that financial investment in the arts has to produce a quick and easily measurable result comparable to shorter hospital waiting times or improved school exam results. The insistence on the institution of a national theatre shows that the politicians remain incapable of giving up that perennial question when it comes to arts funding: “But what do we get for our money?”