Category: issues

The central question raised in this report is: “Are organizations bringing in enough revenue to cover their expenses?” Looking at unrestricted surplus (before depreciation), the average organization saw an unrestricted surplus of 2.1% of expenses in 2016. In the same year, overall operating bottom line (before depreciation) was 0.4% of expenses—virtually break-even. However, surpluses fell to a negative 4.2% when factoring in depreciation, meaning that the average organization is not reserving sufficient funds to repair and replace their fixed assets, which can lead to future challenges, particularly for organizations with high levels of fixed assets.

Charles McNulty: “Directors who have taken advantage of the casting couch, actors who have grotesquely exploited their stardom, conductors who have preyed on their young charges deserve to have the rug pulled out from under them. If the work they’ve done lives on, it will do so apart from the memory of their shameful deeds. This will take time. … But like many who feel a pang of obligation to due process, I can’t help wondering if in the collective rush to right historical wrongs we aren’t in danger of losing sight of other values. Justice, as symbolized by the scales, is an art of delicate calibration. But watershed movements aren’t subtle. They can’t afford to be.”

Jenny Schlenzka, Performance Space’s artistic and executive director, said the organization had decided “nothing would be too holy to be rethought.” The new name, she added, “is signaling an ambition to be relevant and accessible to all of New York.”

“For decades, the U.S. has been the No. 1 destination for international students seeking a foreign college or graduate school education. The U.K. has been second. But in recent years, China has suddenly appeared in the No. 3 slot, and Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, tells Axios that it is on track to overtake the U.K. and capture No. 2 this year.”

The problem is the pop-up museum’s most popular attraction: a pool full of plastic rainbow sprinkles for visitors to roll around and play in.

Here’s the heart of the problem: The set of critics’ and audiences’ interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram. In the audience circle, the pressing question is, “Should I spend some number of the dollars I have to my name and the hours I have left on Earth on this thing?” Critics get in for free and by definition have to read or watch or listen to whatever’s next up. So their circle is filled with relativistic questions about craft and originality and wallet quality and the often unhelpfully general “Is it good?” (Some of them even have an idea of what they mean by “good”; the rest are winging it.)

New data from the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, and Action Fraud – which reports on fraud and cyber crime for the police – shows that the total recorded losses between May and October 2017 came to £1.66 million. This is made up of 3,973 individual reported incidences of ticket fraud – when tickets are purchased but don’t arrive, or turn out to be fake. This is an increase from the 2,885 reports recorded over the same period in 2015.

“It’s worth nothing just how viscerally vicious the Republicans wanted to be towards artists and the creative professions as the Congressional legislative process, such as it was, began. Earlier drafts of the tax bill attempted to discard the “qualified performing artist” deduction for low-income entertainment industry workers. There was an amendment aiming to eliminate low-income housing credit exemptions that are to lure artists into new cities through affordable housing. There was an attempt to treat tuition wavers as taxable income, something that would have disproportionately affected artists who enroll in MFA programs. While none of these items made it in the final version of the tax bill, it demonstrates frothing Republican hostility to anyone in any creative profession anywhere in America.”