DCMS Committee to investigate streaming

A man singing into a microphone in a studio
15 Oct 2020

A new DCMS Committee Inquiry is set to "shine a torch into the murky corners of the streaming payment model".

Arts students to be excluded from Initial Teacher Training bursaries

14 Oct 2020

Students training as teachers in arts subjects will no longer be eligible for any bursaries or scholarships following a Government decision to scrap all remaining financial support for music, art & deisgn, and design & technology.

Arts and humanities subjects, English and business studies will lose the £9,000 finance available last year. For teacher trainees in design and technology, and geography, the drop is greater: in 2020/21 they could claim £15,000.  

But students wishing to teach chemistry, computing, maths and physics will continue to attract bursaries and scholarships worth up to £26,000 – only a £2,000 drop compared with last year.  

Chief Executive of the ISM, Deborah Annetts, is calling on the government to reconsider its decision: “Without continued and appropriate levels of funding for teaching, we risk damaging the future of our children’s music education. The benefits of music for tackling anxiety, stress and depression are well documented, so now more than ever it is crucial that we safeguard the opportunities for future music teachers to ensure our children will benefit from a classroom music education.”

Honours list celebrates the sector’s Covid heroes

Sarah Bowern at ENO
14 Oct 2020

The Queen’s Birthday Honours list includes those whose work during lockdown has inspired other people and prompted new approaches to community engagement.

Dowden's plan: mass testing, a vaccine or waiting out Covid's 'natural course'

14 Oct 2020

The Culture Secretary said he knows the arts are not viable while social distancing requirements remain.

Government withdraws #Fatima jobs campaign following Twitterstorm

13 Oct 2020

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden has distanced his department from a government-backed advertising campaign encouraging young people to change careers and retrain for jobs in tech. An image featuring ballet dancer 'Fatima', suggesting her next job could be in cyber, has prompted a backlash on social media. #Fatima trended on Twitter, with comments saying she should be encouraged and supported to follow her talents and artistic dreams.

Lottery to buy empty seats to make pantos viable

13 Oct 2020

The National Lottery will be buying empty theatre seats this Christmas to enable pantomimes to be staged with social distancing, including star-studded performances at the London Palladium. Up to 250,000 tickets are expected to be made available to the public, and more than 20,000 tickets will go to National Lottery players for free.

Qdos, the UK's biggest pantomime producer, had hoped to stage 34 shows at UK venues this year and is working with the National Lottery to extend the scheme to other venues.

Artists use AI generated art to pay tax in Mexico

13 Oct 2020

Artists in Mexico, who are allowed to pay their taxes with artwork, have established the legal principle that AI generated artworks can be described as ‘art’. British Artist Celyn Bricker and Mexican Architect Arturo Muela created an artwork series AIMADE with a 'third artist’ – the AI neural network – to show that machines can have a type of visual imagination, and that the product of that imagination can meet the official definition of  art.

The series was created from sources including Aristotle and Eugene Goostman, and statements from Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Bill Gates, Steven Hawkings and other contemporary figures discussing AI, automation, taxation or the ‘Turing test’ - a method of inquiry in AI for determining whether a computer is capable of thinking like a human being.

By having the taxation system formally accept the work, the artists have proved that art produced by AI can be legally defined as art. The artwork has now entered into the National Collection of Mexico and collection of the Museo De La Cancilleri.

Galleries share the UK's biggest museum prize

13 Oct 2020

Three art galleries are among the five winners who will get equal shares of the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2020 prize - the world's biggest museum prize and the UK's largest arts award. Aberdeen Art Gallery, South London Gallery and Towner Eastbourne will each receive £40,000 from the fund, as will Gairloch Museum and the Science Museum. In recent years a single winner has received £100,000, with four other shortlisted institutions each getting £10,000. But Art Fund responded to the unprecedented challenges facing museums by selecting five winners and increasing the prize money to £200,000.

North East cultural workers call out discrimination

13 Oct 2020

Venues in the region - many of them funded by Arts Council England - are suffering from "dysfunctional attitudes and practices," workers say.

London Palladium faces questions over Covid safety measures

13 Oct 2020

LW Theatres has insisted that social distancing of at least 1metre was adhered to at the Palladium for the musical Songs For A New World and a Q&A with football manager Arsene Wenger, despite the evidence from some photographs taken at the event. But some audience members questioned about it were happy that appearances were deceptive: "There was a large crowd but we were 2m apart. And when we left they filtered people out in rows, there was no bottleneck", said one. CEO Rebecca Kane Burton wrote on Twitter that the 2,200-capacity Palladium was "operating at around 50% capacity".

Independent fund aims to stimulate more provocative art

13 Oct 2020

A new fund aimed at stimulating more ‘protest’ art will be offering small grants to artists wanting to comment and provoke thought about what's going on in the world. A small steering group of artists, activists, and producers will be making quick-turnaround decisions about the Artcry funding awards, with members of that group changing every six months so that the people who make decisions about new work changes regularly.

Hundreds of arts organisations rejected for emergency funding

13 Oct 2020

Nearly 1,400 arts organisations “woke up to good news” as £257m of Culture Recovery Fund awards were announced, but those who missed out stand a slim chance of survival. 

ACW to fund the ‘re-imagining’ of creative life in Wales

13 Oct 2020

The Arts Council of Wales (ACW) has launched a £4m Lottery-funded scheme that will support collaborative proposals by individual artists and non-arts groups and organisations. ‘Connect and Flourish’ funding will provide grants of between £500 and £150,000, aiming to fill the gaps in the arts infrastructure that the pandemic has exposed. ACW wants the new fund to be a trigger for making the arts in Wales “more representative and accessible” by giving “unheard voices an opportunity”.

Announcing the scheme, ACW said: “The plan is to begin the process of re-imagining how artists in all areas of creative life, from visual artists to lighting designers can sustain themselves and discover different ways of making art now that Covid 19 has had such a devastating effect on the sector.”  

They stress to potential applicants: “We’re not talking about 'business as usual' – instead, we have the opportunity to take a fresh look at how we can achieve a strong and resilient arts sector that properly reflects the fullest range of our country’s people and communities. It’s what we mean by 'resetting the dial'.”

Survival of the fittest? Recovery forecast assumes a third of arts businesses will fail 

09 Oct 2020

ACE has welcomed projections that the sector will recover to pre-Covid levels by 2022. The “bounce back” relies on only the most economically productive organisations surviving.

Campaigning intensifies to secure a future for musicians

09 Oct 2020

A new campaign led by the combined force of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) and The Musicians Movement is hoping to secure a support package to ensure musicians can start earning again. Their collaboration, #MakeMusicWork, responds to the trend for greater coordination between music industry organisations and is designed to increase the impact of the music community’s lobbying of the UK government and across the devolved nations.

They are proposing a new Freelance Performers Support Scheme to help musicians earn money from live performances in Covid-secure spaces, and are continuing to call for changes to the Self- Employment Income Support Scheme to provide a safety net for musicians who cannot work whilst venues remain closed.
The proposal for the Support Scheme is to guarantee performers a minimum fee, even if Covid restrictions change, to give performers some financial security and enable venues and promoters the opportunity to programme in advance without financial insecurity. The scheme put forward is “flexible and scalable in relation to government guidelines” and campaign organisers believe it is “transferable to other arts sectors, with the potential for the sector to unite to develop a one-fund, works for all, arts-sector initiative”.

The Incorporated Society of Musicians’ Chief Executive, Deborah Annetts, said: Now is the time for the entire music community together to unite around clear, effective and realistic policy recommendations for government. Our hope is that more organisations will support our calls for a new Freelance Performers Support Scheme and improving the Self- Employment Income Support Scheme… it is vital that the needs of musicians are properly communicated to the government. Whichever organisation they belong to, musicians are dynamic entrepreneurs who will be back on their feet as soon as the sector can reopen and new support measures need only last until the necessary safety precautions are eased.”

Greater Manchester steps up for culture as Covid's grip tightens in the region

09 Oct 2020

As Manchester's plight as a Covid hotspot continues to have a serious impact on the cultural sector, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has published a Cultural Recovery Plan outlining how the sector will be supported and protected over the next six months while many organisations remain shut and social-distancing requirements remain in place. There are are around 200 large cultural organisations and venues in Greater Manchester, and another 500 smaller community organisations, all of which are being affected by ongoing closures. Announcing the six-month plan, Mayor Andy Burnham said: “The Cultural Recovery Plan outlines how we will protect the arts and night time economy during the usually busy winter period for the sector, with further funding opportunities, virtual events and commissioned activity for artists being developed.”

The main way GMCA supports the cultural sector in Greater Manchester is through its GM Culture Portfolio - 35 cultural organisations based across all ten districts of Greater Manchester, which receive funding to deliver activity throughout the city region.The Plan encourages them to support the wider cultural sector in the region, including renegotiating what they deliver to maximise impact and reflect what is feasible within the next six months. As well as supporting the wider sector, it focuses on building back better and ensuring activity planned before Covid-19 will continue, by
•    Supporting individual artists and freelancers
•    Providing cultural activity for communities hardest hit by Covid-19
•    Providing opportunities for young people
•    Reducing inequality, with a particular focus on BAME, disabled and working class artists and professionals

While this plan focusses on the period up to March 2021, a further plan for 2021-22 will be drawn up early in 2021, when more is known about the longer-term impact of Covid-19 on the region's cultural life.

 

£101m in heritage emergency funding announced

09 Oct 2020

DCMS has announced emergency stipends for heritage organisations totalling £101m, the first major tranche of Culture Recovery Fund grants.

433 organisations will share £67m, with grants ranging from £10,000 to just under £1m. Beneficiaries include well-known heritage sites such as Chiswick House, Stoneleigh Abbey, Rockingham Castle and many of England's major cathedrals.

Another 12 organisations, including Historic Royal Palaces and English Heritage, will together receive £34m for construction and maintenance works.

A second round of heritage grants of up to £3m is expected "imminently", DCMS said.

Grants for arts organisations are expected to be announced early next week.

Arm's-length policy at risk in 'contested heritage' debate

08 Oct 2020

The Government's edicts over controversial statues and other heritage assets are complicating the job of cultural organisations and councils responsible for managing them.

Families could boost sector's recovery, survey suggests

08 Oct 2020

Families are willing to pay as-usual prices for digital and outdoor arts events, but organisations' offerings must meet their specific needs, researchers say.

Welsh freelancers' fund closed in an hour

08 Oct 2020

High demand for the first come, first served fund forced its early closure, to the panic of those who missed out.

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