Outreach programmes like Leeds Grand and Opera North’s ‘Verve’ are among the benefits of funding large arts organisations, argues Alison Piling
There have been a couple of articles in the last week that have generated a fair debate between them: Tim Wheeler’s plea to save the fleet of arts organisations in the face of cutbacks; and some fairly blunt criticism of Phil Kirby’s new-found love of ‘Ghost:the musical’. Who knows what they made of his absolute conversion to Priscilla?
This triggered an internal debate about what this means to me and my family.
I struggled a bit with the jargon. I didn’t know what ACE was, but a quick google sorted that. I might be able to guess what a National Portfolio Organisation is if asked in a pub quiz but I’m pretty sure I don’t know what a PRS new music commission is or how to go about getting one. You see, not everyone who reads Culture Vulture is in the Arts inner circle. I work in transport for instance. We collect acronyms too and, as my NLP*-loving friend would say, we’re a digital lot – if you can’t count it, it doesn’t exist.
(*NLP, if you haven’t come across it, is Neuro Linguistic Programming so that’s cleared that one up).
But anyway what I got from Tim’s blog was that the debate is, of course, about who gets funded when funding is tight. Big or small, opera or street theatre, Edinburgh Tattoo versus Edinburgh Fringe versus fringe of the fringe cos the fringe is getting too mainstream?
There have been a couple of articles in the last week that have generated a fair debate between them: Tim Wheeler’s plea to save the fleet of arts organisations in the face of cutbacks; and some fairly blunt criticism of Phil Kirby’s new-found love of ‘Ghost:the musical’. Who knows what they made of his absolute conversion to Priscilla?
This triggered an internal debate about what this means to me and my family.
I struggled a bit with the jargon. I didn’t know what ACE was, but a quick google sorted that. I might be able to guess what a National Portfolio Organisation is if asked in a pub quiz but I’m pretty sure I don’t know what a PRS new music commission is or how to go about getting one. You see, not everyone who reads Culture Vulture is in the Arts inner circle. I work in transport for instance. We collect acronyms too and, as my NLP*-loving friend would say, we’re a digital lot – if you can’t count it, it doesn’t exist.
(*NLP, if you haven’t come across it, is Neuro Linguistic Programming so that’s cleared that one up).
But anyway what I got from Tim’s blog was that the debate is, of course, about who gets funded when funding is tight. Big or small, opera or street theatre, Edinburgh Tattoo versus Edinburgh Fringe versus fringe of the fringe cos the fringe is getting too mainstream?