Category: issues

San Jose, California arts groups are opposing an offer by the city’s mayor to be funded out of the city’s general budget rather than from a hotel-motel tax (which was sharply down this year. “Once you get into the general fund, you are then competing with police, fire, recreation. And the arts, whether you look at the state or the schools, are always the first to get cut. So if the arts have a dedicated source, like the transient occupancy tax, why would we want to jeopardize that?”

How much influence do donors to arts institutions have on artistic decisions or management of the institution? “Does he who pays the piper call the tunes? Equally relevant, how do the not-for-profits negotiate these treacherous (or, perhaps not-so-treacherous) waters in straitened economic times? For their spin, Back Stage talked with half a dozen theatre administrators, who oversee fundraising, in major not-for-profit theatres nationwide.”

Rural Australia needs an influx of investment in culture. “Cultural policy can easily smack of Big Brother (the political concept, not the TV show), but there are valid reasons why we need to keep culture high on the national agenda. It has nothing to do with opening nights, and everything to do with what Australia needs for a sustainable future. In 2000, the economic value of arts and related industries was about $8 billion. For indigenous Australians, the arts are their single biggest source of non-government income. The arts can provide jobs through flow-on effects such as tourism, but like any other investment, the money tends to gather where the people are.”

This summer Canada lost its “most inviting art magazine and interesting cinema.” Why? “Burnout. Principal founders hit the wall following years of pouring staggering amounts of energy into cultural projects that offered poverty-level financial returns. ‘We got exhausted and infuriated. Any one factor would not be enough to close down the magazine, but if you add it all together’…”

The heat wave in Britain is affecting the movie box office and sales of music. “Box office business at the weekend was down 13% on the previous week, while many films suffered a drop in earnings.” Music album sales were also down about 15 percent.

Are arts organizations facing a new era? An era when government withdraws its support for the arts? “The best advice to nonprofit arts organizations is cold, but realistic: Go out and have a bake sale. The days of generous, hefty, government support of the arts are numbered. The bottom line to dwindling government support isn’t hard to figure out. Everything costs too much.”

The Edinburgh Festival requires a public subsidy of about £2 million to survive. This compares to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which gets about £64,000. “In recent days, the International Festival (EIF) has been attacked by some arts commentators for lack of artistic ambition and for its relatively high level of public funding, in comparison with the Fringe.”

More and more products (movies, cars, perfumes…) are being launched with odd, hard-to-pronounce names. “A name that’s different, that’s unfamiliar can be a plus because it sparks some memory code in people’s brains. They remember it, if only to ask someone else if they’ve ever heard of that word and what it means. Another factor driving the weird-word name trend is the difference between older and younger consumers. For the generations coming-of-age with the Internet, all this media access and interactivity have transformed pop culture into a global playground – what was once foreign and remote is now cool and exotic.”

The form of English commonly spoken by educated Indians is unique in the grammar and formation. “Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour — not all of it intended. Hinglish is full of cricket terminology and army metaphors, with echoes of P.G. Wodehouse and Dickens. It contains clunky puns and impeccably logical neologisms. In short, it is a delight.”