Faced with a $500,000 deficit, Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre reduces staff, shifts its schedule out of the summer, and cuts its budget from $5.9 million to $4.9 million. “Our revenues are being outpaced by expenses. We decided to take really decisive action. We want to make ACT a center for new plays, and the next five months will be a really important time for us to solidify this mission.”
Tag: 01.17.03
Shanghai Express – Miracle Out Of Chaos
“As an event, the Shanghai Biennial would seem a success. Major figures from Europe, America and Asia attended, although many, including a delegation from New York’s MoMA, were making a side trip from a curating conference organised by the Asia Society in Hong Kong. But the longer-term picture is cloudier, as the haphazardly installed, barely coherent Biennial—resembling, at times, an art fair—cemented a growing scepticism overseas about both Chinese art and the possibilities of mounting serious art exhibitions in China.”
Star Turns – The New Celebrity Collectors
“Celebrities and stars figure more and more in the art world. Indeed, Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry are not only avid buyers but part of the group of patrons that supports young talent in Britain. ‘This group of pop and rock stars has truly put its stamp on the market. Such is its impact that it even affects artistic tendencies, but the phenomenon has to be seen as part of a whole movement that includes music, painting and all the arts’.”
English National Opera Chorus Protests Chorus Cuts
Members of the English National Opera have voted a resolution of no-confidence in the company’s management, after the board voted to reduce the number of chorus members from 60 to 40. “There’s obviously a concern for their individual futures and there is a worry that they may be put in a position where they have to audition for their own jobs which is a particularly cruel process.”
How Do You Manage Creativity?
A number of big media companies have been ousting top executives and replacing them with money guys. “This trooping of grey faces into the unruly media world marks a distinct change of mood. Talk of ‘vision’, ‘synergy’ or ‘new paradigms’ is out; the daily grind of evaluating and improving operating performance is paramount. Show business doesn’t attract leaders who know how to listen properly or leave people alone. But when you manage creative people, you must intrude carefully.”
Mickey Mouse, From Behind Bars
So how does Mickey Mouse feel now that the US Supreme Court has refused to spring him into the public domain? Jesse Walker asked him: So yeah, they created me. But they don’t want to let other people build on me when they make their own creations, the way they did when I was born. And now I’m locked up for another stinking 20 years! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to greet kids at Disneyland every single day, always smiling, never slipping off for a cigarette?
The Culture Minister With Lots Of Big Opinions
Kim Howells, the UK’s minister for tourism, film and broadcasting has been pronouncing on culture – that the Turner Prize winners are a disgrace, and that rap music incites violence. Does he “regret shooting his mouth off so regularly, or does he see it as his role to make challenging statements on cultural themes? “I haven’t really been shooting my mouth off. What I’m concerned about is a coarsening of sensibilities. People think that makes me a fuddy-duddy.”
Theatre Cancels Show When Critic Decides To Attend Preview
When the George Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey found out that the New York Times was sending a critic to review a preview performance for its new show, the director decided to cancel the performance. The theater’s staff contacted all 166 ticket holders for the performance to tell them of the cancellation. Says the director: “When it became clear to me that the artistic process was going to be violated and that trust between the press and the theater was going to be violated, I had to put a stop to it. I had no recourse. I could not turn this individual critic away from the performance; that would be discrimination. But I could stop the performance.”
What’s Next
“Some on the public interest side are tempted to lament what could be called the ‘Dred Scott case for culture,’ unjustifiably locking up content that deserves to be free. In fact, the ruling gives public interest activists both motivation and ammunition in the continuing battle against the excessive expansion of the power to control information and culture.”
Truth About Consequences
“Who got robbed? You did. I did. Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain. Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one – a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.”