Category: issues

“The key issue is: why has revenue fallen so far for so many arts organizations? It is not the fault of union members that we are selling fewer tickets or raising less funds.”

The Mongolian State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet presents “14 operas and 14 ballets a year, with multiple performances given to full houses every weekend from October to July. … While the core repertory is Western, the theater also promotes the creation of original Mongolian works and keeps close ties with Mongolian composers.”

“Broadcasters covering the NBA finals for Spanish-speaking fans from different parts of the world do it from a Tower of Babel where a dunk is not a dunk, but the play-by-play guys disagree about just what to call it.”

“A curator’s signature on an online petition is not enough. The great museums should publicise China’s detainee via their sites.”

“The budget set aside for new cultural development would be the envy of any arts administrator: 21.6 billion Hong Kong dollars [USD 2.8bn] … And yet the 40-hectare, or almost 100-acre, site reclaimed from the South China Sea in the 1990s for this purpose is still empty … But finally this year, the government seems to have jump-started the moribund project.”

“You are only making 25 percent of the full-ticket price. Our highest priced ticket is $50 and for a $25 ticket, Groupon would take $12.50. Our tickets only cover 50 percent of actually putting a play up on stage. If we gave all our tickets out at $12.50 we would have to close our doors.”

“Now, the arts have become a vital new facet of local character, in a city derided as a cultural wasteland just 25 years ago. … The trend became starkly visible as arts events filled the calendar in the past year and crowds swelled at museums, performances and festivals” – led by the New World Symphony’s new home and the ever-more-popular Art Basel.

Since the birth of the Turkish nation-state in the 1920s, the the country’s Kurdish population (about 20% of the total) saw its distinctive music, literature, folklore, visual arts and even language suppressed by a government bent on keeping the nation unified. Gradually, Kurdish books, music, theater and proper language classes (long forbidden) are returning to the region.

“Almost a fifth of the organisations in Arts Council England’s new national portfolio were rated as ‘weak’ for financial sustainability … Despite being one of ACE’s three key criteria, 16% of arts organisations were rated as weak on financial sustainability, with 68% rated as good and only 16% rated as strong.”

“While Canada has done well to build the institutions that promote and support our culture, there is a growing gap between what those institutions represent and what is actually filtering down to younger generations. We see this anecdotally and in polling data all the time.”