Category: issues

How? Add some big shows both new and old, sprinkle arts coverage into popular news shows – and raise arts coverage for the BBC by 20 percent.

“If that interest then [develops] into controversy, and if the censorship word comes in, if certain countries start banning it, then that in itself will arouse a little bit of interest, maybe even suspicion. And people will walk through the theater doors, [when earlier] perhaps they thought, ‘Oh, maybe not.'”

“To illustrate the confusion ahead, experts gave the example of what would happen under the new regulations if someone attempted the interstate sale of a 100-year-old Steinway piano with ivory keys. Such a sale has long been permissible, because the piano qualified as an antique that contained ivory imported long before the mid-1970s, when officials began proscribing the material. But the new regulations would prohibit such a sale unless the owner could prove the ivory in the keys had entered the country through one of 13 American ports authorized to sanction ivory goods.”

Union members have occupied Paris’ Opera Garnier in a protest over proposed changes to labor rules for theater workers.

“On a prosaic level, short art frees up precious time. The vexed problem of whether to eat before or after the show evaporates when the thing wraps up after an hour or so. Scheduling becomes easier, and the workweek less of a barrier, if you can make it home by 10.”

“We in the art world were not very clear about our moral imperative around freedom of expression. When I think about it, nobody won that culture war. But we lost it… Last year, the NEA Four were in residence at the New Museum in New York… I’ve been thinking about why is it now—Are the body fluids dry enough? Is the blood purged enough?—that 20 years later, suddenly people are looking back at these artists?”

“This will become the world’s third great urban center of entertainment and arts alongside New York’s Broadway and London’s West End,” said DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“The UK government suggests marching to the beat of the philanthropic drum. But there is no way that philanthropy can generate the kind of money that arts organisations are losing from local authority and Arts Council cuts.”

“Touring plays, musicals, operas, ballets and dance productions will receive a tax credit, in the form of cash back, worth 25% of their costs, while all new non-touring shows will be entitled to a 20% credit.”

Some of it is the particular way Italian law looks at culture and heritage – and some of it, of course, is about cash.