Category: issues

A new poll of residents of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area found overwhelming support for the area’s thriving cultural scene, with 85% saying that the arts improve the cities’ quality of life, and 92% saying that the arts have significant value for children. But when pressed further, poll respondants revealed a distinct split between general expressions of support for the arts, and the type of specific support which translates into ticket sales and contributions. “Only a quarter of those who attended an arts event in 2001 made a financial contribution to an arts group that year. Less than a third of those surveyed rated government support for the arts as ‘very important.'”

In Madison, Wisconsin, local leaders are promoting a referendum which would allow limited casino gambling within the city limits as a method of generating new revenue to support the arts. Gambling initiatives are not uncommon in the Midwest, and with countless Native American casinos already in operation across the region, there is usually little backlash against such proposals, particularly in difficult economic times. But ArtsJournal’s Andrew Taylor reports that, in Madison, many local arts groups are openly campaigning against the gambling initiative, believing that the casino’s very existence will do more harm than good to their bottom lines.

Montreal’s Place des Arts won a major court battle yesterday, when Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the arts center had not engaged in strikebreaking practices when it responded to a 1999 technicians’ strike by telling its tenants that they would need to supply their own technicians in the future. At the time, Place des Arts was fined $5000 for the tactic, but the center won an injunction in 2001, and the legal fight progressed through the courts to the nation’s highest judicial panel. The technicians’ union was stunned by the ruling, but said that its members will continue to abide by a standing truce until a new agreement can be negotiated.

Place des Arts has a long history of trouble with at least two labor unions, and the Supreme Court decision may not mean that the unions are out of options, according to labor experts. Still, the decision is unlikely to do anything to smooth the relationship between the venue and the unions, which has gotten decidedly ugly at times. As recently as 2000, members of the stagehands’ union were sued by Place des Arts for dumping skunk urine on the premises, releasing rats in the lobby, and disrupting performances with heckling and noisemakers.

The Australian state of Victoria has slashed its contribution to the Melbourne Festival by AUS$1 million. The festival receives a recurring grant of $2.5 million, but that has been supplemented in recent years with a “top-up” grant which the festival expected to amount to $4 million this year. Instead, the top-up grant will be $3 million. The cut was not unexpected, and the festival has been negotiating with the government for some time over budget issues.

It is an issue so divisive that British Prime Minister Tony Blair came dangerously close to losing his government over it this week: how to properly fund the UK’s impoverished universities, while maintaining a reasonable level of access for students of varying economic backgrounds. “Past governments have preferred to posture, expanding the universities while allowing them to decline.” But Blair proposed, and then eased through Parliament, a controversial plan calling for major tuition hikes, which are expected to generate £1 billion of new revenue for the system by 2009.

The arts don’t often register even a blip on the national political radar screen these days, but that didn’t stop the American Arts Alliance from asking presidential candidates to sign a “Pledge for the Arts,” and to detail what their hypothetical administrations would do to promote and support America’s cultural scene. John Kerry was the first to sign, and he was followed this week by Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Joseph Lieberman. President Bush did not respond to the Alliance’s request, although one could assume that he intends for his new proposal to boost funding for the National Endowment for the Arts to speak for itself.

“President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States, administration officials said on Wednesday. The proposal is part of a turnaround for the agency, which was once fighting for its life, attacked by some Republicans as a threat to the nation’s moral standards.” The president’s proposal is for a hike of $15 million to $20 million in the fiscal year beginning in October 2004.

It hasn’t been a good year for the arts in Louisville, what with the local orchestra making cuts, and countless other arts groups struggling mightily in the new, and frequently donation-less, economy. The city already has a Fund For The Arts, but larger groups in the area complain that they don’t get their fair share of the fund’s allocated dollars. So what can be done? A conference of arts leaders and supporters came up with a number of ideas to boost the city’s cultural scene, and the first order of business seems to be convincing more Louisvillians that they have an arts scene worth supporting.

It has long been the dirty little secret of the arts world that the majority of the people running the show don’t actually have any particular training in how the arts world works, or how running an orchestra differs from running, say, a textile mill. It’s not that most of these leaders are incompetent people, merely that they are almost forced to learn their job through trial and error. A new program in the UK is aiming to make better administrators out of the folks who run the country’s arts groups, and possibly to attract better leaders to the industry.