Category: issues

“For large-capacity halls that are only in the business of presenting touring commercial entertainment (including Broadway shows), the more seats the better. But in reality, many large-capacity halls were originally conceived and funded to present touring cultural programs — classical music, dance, opera — and to support local arts organizations by being available for rent. And here’s where we get into trouble.”

Sargent, 65, recently stepped down after his latest triumph: leading the team of Sage Gateshead in creating an internationally acclaimed new venue for music in northeast England. Previously Sargent worked for the BBC as concerts planning manager, including the work of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and helped create the BBC Millennium Music Live project.

“When I was Director of the California Arts Council, I floated the idea of adding 25 cents to the price of a movie ticket (in California), the money to come to the Arts Council and support Arts Education (a bit of an easier sell than general arts organization funding). Again, I didn’t think an extra quarter would discourage movie goers.”

“Basically, the science-based firms and industries are out in the suburbs, along highway interchanges, and in newer, low density suburban campuses. The creative industry locations are much more urban, dense, closer to the core of the city, walkable, mixed-use and often served by public transit.”

Beyond the study’s muddled findings about the ways US citizens value visual art (or don’t), YouGov’s more tangential poll questions turned up some amusing results. For instance, when asked “Do you own any paintings, sculptures, or other art works?” a full 4% of respondents — or about 40 people among the 1,000 polled — said they were “not sure.”

“Anyone who’s been to a festival can recognise an archetypal attendee. But what if the festival itself were a person?”

“I don’t think very many Americans understand that a cartoonist in our midst has had to enter what is effectively a version of the F.B.I.’s witness protection program,” Robert Russell, the executive director of Cartoonists Rights Network International, said in the report.

“Raymond Williams is one of those thinkers who helped change his field so profoundly that today it can be difficult to appreciate how original he was. Members of Williams’s generation believed that analyzing culture would bring about revolution. Much of their prose now sounds turgid, and many of their political hopes were either beaten into submission or inflated into a hyperbole that remains purely hypothetical.”

“In short, by becoming more commercial, the Kimmel has adopted a business model that underwrites the rents of its resident companies by presenting less art and more popular entertainment. Thus, it leans more lightly on philanthropy, which pleases the overtaxed donor community. The benefits are real.” But…

“State tax coffers have filled faster than expected this year, and the governor’s annual ‘May revise’ of the original spending plan he proposed in January would share a modest morsel of the wealth – $5 million – with the California Arts Council, the state’s arts grant-making agency.”