Category: issues

New York State is going after venues that add on fees to ticket prices. “When the consumer sees a ticket price advertised for $100, that should be the price you pay. We don’t want the consumer exposed to a situation where they are led to believe that the ticket price is $100 and then you get to the box office only to be told that there’s a $1 restoration or a $2.50 convenience charge or whatever the venue calls their added-on fee. If the theatre feels it needs a dollar to go to a restoration fund, that’s their business, but they should advertise that the ticket costs $100 or $101, whatever the total is. The rest is accounting.”

Last year New York’s City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting use of cell phones in theatres and concert halls. The mayor vetoed it. Wednesday, the council voted 38-5 to override the veto. Henceforth, in New York City, “talking on a cell phone, dialing, listening or even having one ring during a performance will constitute a violation punishable by a $50 fine.”

The Arts Council of England says it will “nearly double” the amount it gives to individual artists, increasing spending to £25 million per year. The council also said it “would increase funding of the groups it already supports by a further £70 million, to £300 million by 2006. The Arts Council says the drive is designed to place ‘the arts at the heart of national life’.”

The Arts Council of England has relaunched itself as Arts Council England, with a new logo and 100 fewer staff. Now there will be just the Arts Council, with regional offices, one telephone number and one application form for artists, replacing more than 100 different grants schemes.” The council says the changes would “save almost £20m over the next three years, and £8m a year after that, all to be ploughed back into the arts.”

“In what might end a three-year legal fight, a Paris court Tuesday threw out accusations by French human rights activists who said Yahoo should be held legally responsible for auctions that were once held on its website of Nazi paraphernalia. The court ruled that Yahoo and its former chief executive, Tim Koogle, never sought to ‘justify war crimes and crimes against humanity’ as they were accused of doing by human rights activists, including Holocaust survivors and their families.” The suit was a complicated one, since France does not allow the display or sale of racist material. At one point, a judge had ordered Yahoo to block French users from viewing or participating in auctions of Nazi material.

Britons spend £3 billion a year on culture.” According to one study, “the amount spent by UK adults on going to the theatre, cinema, concert or art gallery is more than 15 times that spent on tickets to Premiership football matches in a season (classical musical ticket sales at £359 million a year account for almost twice the revenue of Premiership tickets). Yet how many of us are getting our money’s worth?”

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council lost everything on September 11—and “not just their offices in 5 WTC, the databases, the archives, the stage on the plaza. An artist in their residency program died in his studio on the 92nd floor of Tower One. Others had harrowing close calls. A tech crew was mopping the plaza stage for that night’s dance performance as debris started falling. Another artist made it safely down the steps from the 91st floor. And executive director Liz Thompson was on the last elevator out of Windows on the World.” Now they’re into a new home. “They didn’t just survive—they bounced back, stronger and more necessary than ever. Founded 30 years ago to help revitalize a moribund downtown, they face that challenge anew, but this time with a long track record of arts advocacy behind them.”

In New York, a down economy and cuts in arts funding are starting to make a visible impact on the city’s arts institutions. “Museums, theaters, concert halls, opera companies, public gardens and zoos throughout the five boroughs are cutting performances, exhibitions, days of operation and staff members. This is only the beginning, arts executives say. ‘It’s like a patient whose health is slipping. The strong will reduce what they do and the weak will have to take more drastic measures’.”

British and French artists of the 19th Century competed with one another, collaborated and spurred one another on – indeed, there was much to-ing and fro-ing. “The artistic and literary relationship between France and Britain – which also included a French fascination and infatuation with Walter Scott, and with Shakespearian themes – was much more a matter of give and take than, say, the British artistic love affair with New York between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, in which British art played a largely subservient role.”

Despite harsh public criticism in the past few weeks, the Scottish culture minister says there will be no injection of cash to help the arts. Nor will there be a bailout of the Scottish Opera, which is in dire financial condiction. And what of the National Theatre plan? That, says the minister, will still go ahead, and he hopes to attend first performances there while he is still in government. But with a static arts budget, observers are skeptical.