Is Art For The Sake Of Art Missing The Point?

Nonprofit organizations must be service-oriented to better the lives of those who cannot better it on their own. Using that as a jumping-off point, I believe that every single person has the right to succeed. Yet a whole slew of people cannot act on that right without being blocked. Therefore, if I should choose to run another nonprofit arts organization before my mortal coil shuffle happens, our group would happen to produce plays. But, everything we would do would be for the purpose of connecting and improving the effectiveness of those with expertise and working service portals — those with access to a proverbial “underground railroad.”

UK Claims For Tax Relief Were Sharply Up Last Year

Theatre tax relief was introduced in 2014, offering qualifying productions a reduction in corporation tax of 20%, or 25% if they were touring. It is among a suite of tax incentives offered by the Government to the creative industries, with other beneficiaries including film, video games and high-end television. Last year there were 910 successful claims for theatre tax relief, with both large and small productions benefiting. About half of the relief awarded (£39m) went to claims for over £500k, of which there were 40. At the other end of the scale, more than a third of the claims (330) were for amounts of less than £10,000.

A Public UK Museum Releases Its Images To The Public Domain, Abolishing License Fees

“I bring better news from the campaign to abolish fees for images of works in British public collections. Birmingham Museums Trust has decided to go for “open access”, the first major British museum to do so. In a pioneering move, the trust will make images of copyright-expired works of art freely available to use under a CCO Creative Commons licence.”

Why Would A Sane Woman Go On A TV Dating Competition? As Performance Art (Of One Kind Or Another)

Ann Hirsch is a video artist who created a YouTube persona that attracted many thousands of viewers and got picked up by 4chan. Cathy Nardone just wanted to be on TV; she had done one reality series and was itchin’ for more. As part of Slate‘s “Decoder Ring” podcast series, Willa Paskin looks at what happened when the two women assumed fake personas to get on VH!’s Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair. (audio)

How Popular Music Has (And Hasn’t) Responded To The Current Era Of Inequality

Scott Timberg: “During the Great Depression, which saw widespread homelessness and US unemployment reaching 25 percent, popular films showed the very rich drinking cocktails in formal dress; cheery songs like ‘Pennies From Heaven’ charted. And in the post-2008 decade of recession, instability, and income inequality, blockbuster acts spent a lot of time telling us the incredible time they were having. The real story of the past decade has been harder to hear.”

Dalouge Smith On How You Bring Back Music Education To Schools

The outgoing president of the San Diego Youth Symphony explains how he helped rebuild music ed in San Diego area schools: “We started with violins and cellos and violas and double bass. Actually we put third graders on double bass. We started that because we had asked the leaders in the community and the principals of the schools what instruments would be the right instruments to start with and the response we got was We have a tradition of string instruments in our community. We believe that there would be a strong response to string instruments. So when we first started this was 2010 we saw that kids were simply behaving better in their classes and as a result there was less disruption in the class. And that meant everybody was learning better in the class.”

How Does The Job Of Artistic Director For A Theatre Need To Change For Today’s World?

At its annual conference last month, Theatre Communications Group asked four leading figures – Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Woolly Mammoth in D.C.; Lisa Portes, head of directing at DePaul University’s Theatre School; Jack Reuler, artistic director of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; and Mica Cole, repertory producer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival – to answer that question. Here are their responses.

Educator Warns: Big Orchestral Instruments Are In Danger Of Extinction

“Oboes and bassoons are generally not known at all in schools. They might have picture on the wall but they haven’t seen them in the flesh. This has been reflected in the massive falling off of the number of children learning them. The sheer physical size of the instruments, the complications of the reeds, and the expense of lessons has led to these instruments being sidelined.”