ARTSCAPE:FESTIVALS AND SUMMER schools are in full flow. Galway faces into its closing weekend with strong rumours that Edward Hall's father and sister (Peter Hall, and actor Rebecca Hall) will be in town for the Propeller shows. And Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) has been renewing his acquaintance on foot with the city he lived in briefly in 2001. (Catch the action vicariously on gaftv at galwaysartsfestival.com, and on the slideshow on irishtimes.com.)
It’s hard to know how the current economic climate (CEC) is affecting ticket sales or attendances, with anecdotal reports of people leaving it later and later to book, and some rock ticket sales slow. Some arts festivals grasped the nettle, such as Cork Midsummer’s “5 for €55” promotion, which encouraged people buying a couple of tickets to get better value; others have used some of the downsides of the CEC to their advantage, such as Junction in Clonmel, which commandeered a number of empty shops for art cafes. Kilkenny Arts Festival (Aug 7th-16th) has a promotion where all children get in free – taxback.com is covering the cost of 2,000 children’s tickets.
At Galway Arts Festival more ticket sales than ever have been very last minute, and they got a good response to late discounting and bundling (three for €50, two for €35) of tickets in selective offers, often via the festival’s Facebook page. Speculation in Galway about why some shows were slower to sell (though others sold out quickly) included having a recent fortnight of free entertainment at the Volvo Ocean Race (which had a multiple of the funding that the festival has); that tickets were overpriced; that the city’s large number of public service workers have had their discretionary spending chopped.
And while many organisations have had to trim their sails with reduced funding available, there have still been lots of free events generally this summer, from the Circus Festival in Temple Bar and the World Street Performance Championships a couple of weeks ago, to the Macnas parade in Galway last weekend. Coming up, from July 31st to August 2nd is the annual Spraoi Festival (www.spraoi.com) in Waterford, featuring street art, music and a parade. Waterford has been hit particularly hard this year, and in response, earlier this month Spraoi hosted an extra weekend festival at the People’s Park. The company got great feedback afterwards, which, says TV Honan of Spraoi, “goes to the heart of what the arts can offer people in these troubled times . . . we must take heart and shout the message from the rooftops”.
Also coming up (August 29rd-30th) is the Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire – trimmed this year to two days, but packed full of free events. And let’s not forget a jewel in the crown: our galleries and museums, an amazing resource that is free – unlike in many countries – although this, too, has fallen under the eye of “Bord Snip Nua”.
Donegal puts a figure on it
There are a some interesting numbers in Donegal County Development Board’s Cultural Compass Research Project 2007-2008 – the first in-depth study in Ireland on the economic and social benefits of culture on a particular area. So: 69 respondents employed a total of 1,077 staff, which is 1.5 per cent of the paid employment in the county; there are 67,510 cultural assets ( artefacts, archive material, artworks and heritage sites) in Donegal; just 46 respondents sureveyed showed cultural infrastructure benefited the Donegal economy by almost €18 million in2007-08; 40 cultural facilities attracted 480,000 visitors in 2007. The arts scene in Donegal, where this year’s county-wide Earagail festival has just finished, is vibrant – some see the county as being where Galway was 20 years ago in terms of energy and growth. The report, set up by the development board’s Cultural Forum, also looks at how cultural activity increases social cohesion, community development, social inclusion and community safety. Download at donegalcdb.ie/news/execsumculturcomp.pdf.
Sniping at ‘Snip’
Arts bodies are gearing up in response to the Bord Snip Nua recommendations. Labour Party members of the Joint Committee on Arts, Sport, Tourism, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs have asked the clerk of the committee to invite Colm McCarthy to appear before it and expand on the reasoning behind the proposals. According to Labour Party spokeswoman on Arts, Sport and Tourism Mary Upton and Jack Wall, “while the report makes a number of very sensible recommendations there are other issues, such as reducing the tourism marketing fund and closing the Irish Film Board, which need to be debated”. They hope McCarthy will appear before the committee in early September.
And the sniping has begun too. Mary Upton said “in a report which has recommended the closure of the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and a huge reduction in exchequer funding of Arts, Sport and Tourism it seems very strange that no mention was made of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Comhaltas receives funding from at least three Government departments: Arts, Sport and Tourism, Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and Foreign Affairs.”
On LMFM radio, Labhras Ó Murchú of Comhaltas offered to give Upton a copy of its annual report so she could see their accounts. “I do not think it is appropriate,” Upton says, “that, as a public representative, I should have to ask for a statement of accounts, where public money from a number of Government departments is directly provided . . . I asked him to publish the accounts on the Comhaltas website . . . He refused to commit to doing this, saying there were constraints.”
Open letter to Medvedev
Irish author Roddy Doyle and Imma director Enrique Juncosa have joined artists and writers from around Europe in signing an open letter to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, protesting at the charges brought against Moscow museum director Yuri Samodurov and art curator Andrei Yerofeev. The pair are charged with “incitement of hatred or enmity and denigration of human dignity with use of one’s official position” for organising in March 2007 a modern art exhibition, Forbidden Art 2006.
If found guilty, they could face up to five years’ imprisonment.
The exhibition in Moscow’s Sakharov Museum included works of art, including some by Russian contemporary artists Ilya Kabakov, Aleksandr Kosolapov, Aleksandr Savko and Mikhail Roginskii, that had been refused inclusion at various exhibitions in 2006.
