Archive for April, 2008
links for 2008-04-25
April 25th, 2008 • links
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Another site based on the wisdom of crowds..
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Kevin Kelly: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
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“It was a nice thesis that got a lot of blog-attention, but it was short on actual data. I solicited real numbers from those who wrote me, and I also sought out others who had a reputation for thriving on a dedicated fan base…”
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“Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks.”
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Can Chicago be a union town and a theater town? “So here we have a Chicago liberal’s dilemma. The art is affordable and plentiful, but the labor is getting screwed.”
we’re number two (three)!
April 24th, 2008 • teaching
Noted in passing, The Independent ranks Glasgow University as the number two institution in Scotland, and the third-ranked university for drama, dance and cinematics in the UK as a whole - which is particularly nice, given how relatively small our department is.
links for 2008-04-23
April 23rd, 2008 • links
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“Love is being designed as a completely user-driven world, where players have control of their environment and changes made are experienced by everyone.”
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“His game, Love, is a miracle: a near indescribable mix of massively multiplayer exploration game, art project, design tool and hippy commune, that he’s built alone. “
links for 2008-04-21
April 21st, 2008 • links
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Comedians testing new material in small-scale venues.. umm, not sure this is exactly a new development.
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Except that he doesn’t actually say that. He probably agrees, but it’s an entirely made-up headline quote. *sigh*
arts council holds £150 million surplus
April 17th, 2008 • research, theatre
Quote of the day as the Arts Council defends its practice of sitting atop a huge pile of public money, where the argument appears to be “we’re stockpiling slightly less of your money than we were before”:
The Arts Council stands accused of misusing lottery funds after failing to distribute more than £150 million intended for cash-strapped projects. [...]
“A lottery cash balance is not spare cash sitting in the bank. It represents committed funds not yet paid out,” she said. “We have already made significant reductions to our balance - down from £224 million in March 2004 to £152 million at March 2008.”
She added that the surplus target was £140 million, but £10 million of payments due to go out by the end of March were delayed “as the necessary legal charges were not in place”.
The spokeswoman for the Arts Council was unable to say where the £152 million had been committed, and that the accounts team would have to check that information: worth a follow-up story, perhaps?
fringe economics
April 16th, 2008 • theatre
Despite the Scotsman’s coverage, I think it’s pretty obvious that the decision taken by the four biggest Fringe comedy venues to collaborate and bill themselves as the “Comedy Festival” is motivated by pragmatism, rather than any desire to split away from the Fringe. In fact, the managers at each venue have been very specific in making that crystal clear to companies coming up to Edinburgh this summer.
I am slightly confused, though, by Fringe Director Jon Morgan’s reading of the picture:
[He] said the comedy collaboration may be necessary to shore up what he calls the event’s “fragile economies”.
He added: “The cost of running a venue and a show is rising – accommodation, licences, none of these are going down.
“A lot of the planning is highly marginal – often the management of a Fringe venue or show is on a knife edge of happening or not happening.
If there are venues which have any measure of security against the fragile economies of the fringe, it’s these four. And, more importantly, their book-balancing act is rather different from the vast majority of other, smaller venues that make up the body of the Fringe.
I’m also reminded of the relationship between fringe finances and the deliberate choices taken by some venue organisers over the last five to ten years. At the end of last year’s Fringe, a story in The Times reported:
William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly, the festival’s largest theatre operation, said that competition for audiences is now too tough.
“Even great shows, with great reviews, have not been getting the crowds. It’s the first time I have felt there are too many shows in Edinburgh.” [...]
Mr Burdett-Coutts began working with the Assembly Rooms on George Street more than 25 years ago. This year his empire has grown to eight venues around Edinburgh with 144 shows and a total of 700,000 tickets to sell during the festival.
“I’m as guilty as anyone else. There is a limited local audience. We have expanded our shows,” he said. Sales are down 10 per cent in terms of where they should be, Mr Burdett-Coutts added.
To complain about the number of tickets on sale at the fringe while simultaneously increasing your own venue’s contribution to that mountain is possibly a little churlish.
And given that context, while collaboration of venues does indeed represent good practice financially (and even artistically in the promotion of comedy as genre) you might just see it as a response to an economic situation that large venues have helped created for themselves.
Finally, you could argue there’s an implicit rationale in the behaviour of a number of venues at the fringe, a kind of ticketing arms race where increasing the number of venues under a particular management banner both increases your chances of taking a greater proportion of the potential total box-office, and distributes the risk associated with failure. Collaborative marketing - greater co-operation between venues - might be a step toward slowing that race.
Consciously or otherwise, it’s part of an economics of the long tail - and I’m not sure that such a model works at the level of individual company or performer in the environment of the Fringe.
