Category: issues

“Nine top executives of the J. Paul Getty Trust will give up about $250,000 in pay in conjunction with other budgetary cuts during the coming fiscal year, a museum spokeswoman said Thursday.”

“Once flush with corporate and private donations, rising ticket revenue and government subsidies, many nonprofit arts groups now find themselves reeling. Cuts of every kind — staff and artist layoffs, furloughs, canceled performances and tours, truncated seasons — are widespread.”

“The time-honored system of black-tie charity tributes is breaking down, another casualty of the worst economic climate in decades. With honorees in short supply, the entire fund-raising ecosystem on which many nonprofit institutions depend — especially those reliant on the financial sector — is endangered.”

“Until recently, there was an unambiguous division of labour between arts institutions and the press. One side delivered programming, the other provided exposure, evaluation and public scrutiny. Any suggestion that these roles could blend together would elicit howls of condemnation. But if the marketplace or cultural patrons cannot sustain arts journalism, those with a stake in its survival must come up with alternatives. And it’s already happening.”

“The Ontario government took aim yesterday at U.S. entertainment giant Ticketmaster by introducing a new law that would block companies from charging scalpers’ prices for tickets to concerts and sporting events on resale websites they own. … Attorney-General Chris Bentley said yesterday that he has heard ‘loud and clear’ from consumers in Ontario that they are not getting fair access to tickets for their favourite events.”

“Germany’s museums, theaters and libraries are benefiting from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s economic stimulus plan, using unexpected windfalls to fix leaky roofs, crumbling facades and drafty windows. … ‘We are winners of the economic crisis,’ Wolfgang Heckl, director general of the Deutsches Museum, said….”

“As if we needed another sign that the Dr. P. Phillips Orlando Performing Arts Center may not open on time, staffers have quietly removed the massive ‘2012’ flag that had been waving over the center’s downtown site.” But a spokeswoman says the reason is not what we’d think …

“Twenty-one area nonprofit groups have suspended their memberships in the United Way and joined a fledgling competitor, citing years of frustration with a steady decline in workplace giving in the Washington region and lingering distrust of the local United Way since it was nearly destroyed by scandal earlier this decade.”

Among the more than 600 cultural events accompanying the 2010 Winter Olympics are new theatre works by Laurie Anderson and Robert Lepage, dance premieres by choreographers Marie Chouinard and Crystal Pite, Alberta Ballet’s dance to Joni Mitchell songs, Mahler’s mammoth 8th Symphony, a new staging of Nixon in China, and a stage work by Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland.

“Zimerman’s entrance into the political fray was hardly unique. Consider his countryman, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the pianist and composer who became so involved in Polish politics that he was elected prime minister in 1919. Or composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who refused to accept an award at the White House from President George H.W. Bush in 1989.”