“Since its introduction in the mid-1990s, the UK National Lottery has made a lot of poor people slightly poorer while equipping Arts Councils to enrich an arts sector that disproportionately serves the better-off. It is not hard to picture an old woman applying coin edge to scratch card, with no more chance of winning the jackpot than of stepping inside the gallery she has helped to build. Can we still claim that the arts are a ‘good cause’ when ill-spent money is increasingly used like this?”
Toronto Symphony Posts Surplus Of $2.3 Million (!)
“Although the TSO has been in the black for many years, the surplus for 2017-18 is significant. After many years of small, slow declines in ticket revenue, the organization posted a 17 per cent rise in ticket sales over the 2016-17 season. Subscription revenue has been steady, but revenue from single-ticket sales last season was up 26 per cent. This is a remarkable accomplishment, largely due to interim CEO Gary Hanson, a veteran orchestra manager.”
New NHS Program Uses Dance To Help The Elderly Avoid Falls
“Dance to Health started with a hunch: that the arts have the potential to deliver health improvement more effectively and more cost-effectively than the NHS. We needed a major health challenge that the arts might solve. We lighted upon older people falling over.”
A Remote Irish Opera Company That Shouldn’t Work, But, Improbably Does
“I was once told by the then chairman of a leading American opera company that the reason Wexford has rightly survived is because from the outset its rationale was plain wrong. He was right: the dream by a small group of local people, including a GP, a hotelier and a postman, in the early 1950s, of bringing international singers to a remote corner of Ireland to present rarely performed operas, wouldn’t even get past the first page of a modern-day feasibility study.”
How Do You Get Art Closer To The Grass Roots Community? Experiment In Public
BAC operates using a practice model called Scratch, which involves sharing an idea publicly at an early stage of its development, getting feedback and using it to get the idea on to the next stage. We scratch everything. It might sound unfinished, but it actually gives an artist the freedom to creatively go for what they want to achieve, potentially fail, learn and go again – repeating this cycle until they get to where they need to be.
Iceberg, Melting
Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew — again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint.
Recent Listening: Quartette Oblique
Michael Stephans, David Liebman, Marc Copland, Drew Gress: Quartette Oblique (Sunnyside)