Category: issues

“The 10-point plan includes an £80 million match-funding scheme to be set up to encourage private donors. The government will also promote “planned giving” to encourage more people to leave 10% of their legacy to the arts and culture.”

“Arts Council England is to take over some of the key responsibilities that help keep museums and libraries across the UK running. Arts Council England will receive an annual budget of £46m for this purpose.”

“The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, today announced an £80m match-funding scheme to encourage private giving to arts organisations, and launched a review ‘to encourage philanthropy across the whole of government’ to be completed next spring.”

“More than three million people are expected to attend the Cultural Olympiad’s London 2012 festival, which if successful, will represent a spectacular turnaround for a project which has been widely derided as a potential flop.”

“USA Projects on the www.unitedstatesartists.org website hopes to connect people with artists and raise tax deductible contributions for original works. Current projects seeking contributions, starting from as little as $1.”

“The $2.5 million in combined annual fellowships, first awarded in 2006, dwarfs all of the nation’s annual arts prizes except the MacArthur Fellowship, which currently antes up nearly $4 million a year for artists.”

Rebecca Robertson’s “vision for the armory as a 21st-century arts center is hitched to ‘the power of the space.’ It means using that unobstructed drill hall–an area she says is unavailable elsewhere in New York City–to accommodate spectacles like ‘Leonardo’s Last Supper.’ And instead of following the normal practice of focusing on one or more of the performing arts or on the visual arts, ‘We do all of the arts equally,’ Ms. Robertson says.”

“In 16th, 17th, and 18th-century Italy, nuns routinely sought loopholes in the edicts issued by local church authorities, and occasionally broke rules in spectacular fashion.” There were “nuns who plotted escapes, who burned down their own convent, and one who got caught sneaking out to the opera, disguised as an abbot.”

“Creative industry players — entertainment and art — in almost all African countries single out lack of funds as the major hurdle in their quest to promote and sustain the industry. They say both governments and the private sector do not have policies on the industry and neither do they consider it a priority.”

“More than 1,000 events – some ticketed, some free – will make up the UK-wide cultural celebration, running from 21 June to 9 September 2012.”