“The proposed upgrades include a permanent function centre at the Opera House overlooking the harbour and a new waterfront public square at Walsh Bay. About $202 million would be spent on the opera house, which was completed in 1973 and attracts 8 million tourists a year.”
Category: AUDIENCE
How Much Should A Funder Be Able To Dictate What The Art It Funds Should Accomplish?
“It is a given now that in order to get a foundation grant, it’s often not enough to simply apply for funding of what you do day in and day out. What do funders want? Innovation! New ways of ‘engaging’ younger audiences! High-impact special projects that others will want to emulate!”
Fifty Years Ago, Britain’s Only White Paper On The Arts Suggested Daily Engagement – Did It Work?
“The good news is that the arts are a significant contributor to the economy; the bad is that culture and creativity are being erased from the classroom, and that audiences for the arts are substantially white, middle class, affluent and well educated. Worryingly, there is a downward trend in participation.”
Why Do People Relate To Characters Who Aren’t Real?
“Fiction offers many pleasures – we may enjoy its capacity to make the world anew for us through its descriptions, or to advance our understanding of science or philosophy through its application of ideas to examples of human behaviour, but although it does – on examination – seem so faint as to be numinous, nonetheless it’s our conviction that fictional characters’ hopes, fears and desires matter that allows fictions to become facts on the ground – a ground we sympathetically traverse alongside them.”
Crowdsourcing A Beloved Bookstore’s Minimum Wage Raise
“It occurred to Beatts that, to his customers, something like a membership might seem not only like an opportunity to help Borderlands but also like a genuine business transaction: they would be paying for the continued existence of what, to them, was an important gathering place.”
Dear Movie Studios: How About Bundling All Of The Oscar Nominees Into One Streaming Package?
“It isn’t hard to imagine someone downloading a best picture bundle and plowing through two or three movies a night the week leading up to the Oscars. The proposition has the added bonus of heightening interest in the broadcast, thus driving viewers to it and perhaps sparking their interest in other nominees, creating a theoretical virtuous cycle.”
Carnegie Hall’s New Chairman Of The Board Would Like More Pop Music There
Ronald O. Perelman, billionaire business titan and a self-described ‘frustrated musician,’ … [has] succeeded Sanford I. Weill, who has served as chairman for nearly a quarter-century. … Mr. Perelman, 72, said that he was not much of a classical music enthusiast and would push for the hall to stage more of the pop performances it was known for decades ago.
SoCal Arts Groups Courting A New Donor Source: Chinese-Americans
“With a median income that exceeds the national average, and a cultural heritage that prizes the arts, it’s little wonder that Chinese Americans would be seen as a promising source of donations. But there are challenges. Many wealthy Chinese Americans are immigrants who don’t have strong connections to L.A.’s cultural institutions. … [And] for wealthy Chinese Americans living in L.A., arts philanthropy is a relatively new concept.”
When Virtual Reality Becomes Good Enough, Will Masses Of People Just Give Up On Real Life?
“The appeal of these environments is not so much that they help us totally escape reality. Rather, it is that they make us believe that we can recreate and change our own.’ In that way, rather than forcing a mass rejection of society, virtual worlds may open new ways of examining our own.”
If Too Many Arts Professionals Come From “The Elites”, Well, Whose Fault Is That?
“Judi Dench, David Morrissey and Julie Walters have all lamented [working-class folks’] absence. But, interestingly, they each talk about the opportunities for working-class kids that existed 20, 30, even 40 years ago, when they were establishing their careers. What has changed between then and now has nothing to do with the socially and ethically conscious people that largely make up our arts sector.”