Andrew Taylor on the Business of Arts & Culture
www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/
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That's One Big Canary!
Posted: July 15, 2003
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But since when did the local or regional symphony become the canary in our cultural coalmine? The troubles of symphonies are certainly, well, troublesome. And given their relative budget size in their communities‹and the number of musicians they employ‹there's good reason to raise the red flag. But symphonies are a very specific species of nonprofit arts organizations‹generally larger, generally better endowed, generally sustaining a higher production cost. It would be a shame to define policy based on the whale, and miss the kelp and the krill (okay, bad metaphor, but you get the point). Symphonies are part of an ecosystem. If we're going to panic, let's panic in a more general and systemic way.
":Some of the better people in the field are quietly saying that orchestras spend too much -- that they're spending more than they take in, and have been doing so ever since the '90s, though they didn't notice because of the economic boom."