Category: issues

One of the biggest challenges for arts organizations is finding good sound board leadership. “Tony Scotford, a Sydney lawyer and outspoken arts advocate, has an innovative solution – a board ‘bank’ where the best talent can be matched with the neediest companies – on the cards as part of the Australian Business and Arts Foundation’s future projects. If it works like the health industry’s sperm and blood banks, why not? So many of our boards are the result of mateship, or favours, or a reward for sponsorship.”

As money gets tighter, American arts organizations are rethinking their operations. “To survive, cultural establishments nationwide are pooling resources, taking artistic risks, and stepping up outreach – rethinking everything from fundraising tactics to show times to get people back to the box office. In a time of financial famine, the arts are getting creative. ‘These organizations are like farm animals in the 1930s dust belt. They have less and less to sustain them’.”

Arts funding may be getting slashed, burned, and beaten into the ground as the U.S. struggles with a dismal economy, but in Ontario, arts advocates are expecting a jump in cultural spending as the provincial government releases its budget today. “In 1995, the council’s $42 million budget was cut dramatically by $25 million, where it has hovered since,” but the federal and provincial governments have shown a willingness in recent years to jump in and bail out struggling arts groups. An increase in arts funding would have the potential to reduce the number of struggling groups, and thus, the number of needed bailouts.

On the same day that Colorado arts advocates had scheduled a special day of lobbying on behalf of their profession, the joint budget committee the Colorado legislature voted to completely eliminate public funding for the arts. If the plan passes in the full legislature, Colorado would join Oregon and New Jersey in becoming the only states to zero out cultural funding. (None of those states has yet finalized its decision to kill the funding.) Colorado already ranks dead last in the nation in per capita arts spending. The proposed cuts would eliminate about $1.5 million in arts spending.

The Royal Opera House will set up screens around the country this summer and broadcast performances out on the streets. “Productions by the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet will be beamed to outside screens in Sheffield, Liverpool, Gateshead, Belfast and London’s Canary Wharf. It is part of an initiative to reach people who would not normally watch ballet or opera.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s preliminary 2004 budget calls for a cut of 17 percent from the proposed budget for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. “The city’s Independent Budget Office – in its March analysis of the mayor’s preliminary budget – is comparing the proposed 2004 funding to the June 2002 financial plan, which had set the DCA budget at $123.4 million. The new budget would be $102.5 million.

The recent slash in California’s arts funding isn’t worth all the hand-wringing, says Christopher Knight, simply because the state wasn’t really doing anything helpful for actual artists even before the cuts. In the 1990s, artists learned that the way to get funding from an increasingly hostile set of lawmakers is to tie absolutely everything they do to education and social services, which results in mandates that funding be spent on repetitive and pointless programs rather than on the creation of actual art. “Why the inverted priority in the real world? No mystery: Artists don’t have advocates in Sacramento. The arts bureaucracy does.”

A unique conference in Boston has brought together arts organizations, cultural advocates, and state politicians in an effort to better educate the disparate artistic community in the more pragmatic aspects of financial survival in tough economic times. Participants shared fundraising and lobbying techniques, heard from high-ranking legislators concerning what tactics work best at the statehouse, and discussed methods for broadening the diversity of audiences.

Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran stepped into the lion’s den this week, appearing at an arts conference to explain the legislature’s decision to slash the state arts budget, and to advise activists on how to avoid future cuts. “He admitted most politicians still regard the arts as ‘elitist’ and added ‘the two most compelling areas for us’ are education and health care… Finneran also noted legislators break down budget appropriations into three levels of funding: ‘essential,’ which he said is ‘in the eye of the beholder’; ‘desirable’; and ‘Nice, but…’ This is not a good time to be part of that third group.”

Arts Council England has announced a large increase in arts funding. “Overall, the Arts Council – funded by government money and lottery receipts – will distribute £410 million by 2005/6, compared with £335 million in 2003/4. A host of new groups, which do not usually get funding from the Arts Council, will get £123 million. Individual artists will benefit from a £25 million fund for the next three years – double what is available to them now.”