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Posts Tagged ‘artsjournal’

Arts Jobs for UK Youth

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

ArtsJournal.com is a great source of leads from around the world, which is why I sometimes come up with stories from far away places like Belarus. The ArtsJournal blog covers art, theater, film, books, dance, music, media — and interesting creativity tidbits from the world of psychology.

Recently a link to the British publication The Stage highlighted a story about UK policymakers taking steps to build the next generation of artists.

Nicola Merrifield writes that the national strategy, Building a Creative Nation, “is calling upon the UK’s 107,000 creative sector employers to each recruit a person aged 16 to 24 by 2016.

“The initiative is designed to ensure that young people are able to gain paid jobs in arts organisations. It will urge employers to join organisations such as the Royal Opera House and Ambassador Theatre Group in signing up to the Fair Access Principle, which encourages responsible recruitment practices.

“As part of the campaign, Creative and Cultural Skills, the sector’s leading body for skills development, will create 5,500 apprenticeships, paid internships and traineeships across the UK by 2016.

“This is part of CC Skills’ £15 million Creative Employment Programme launched earlier this year to combat unpaid internships in the arts sector, which aims to subsidise 6,500 training schemes for people aged 16-24. This scheme, which was financially supported by ACE, has seen employers take on 1,000 unemployed people so far.

“Industry leaders including former Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall, ticket provider Live Nation’s international chief operating officer Paul Latham and Dirty Dancing founding co-producer Michael Jacobsen are backing the Building a Creative Nation strategy.

“Pauline Tambling, joint chief executive of CC Skills, said: ‘We’re looking to build upon the work that our supporters have been doing to help young people into work across the creative industries, which has already achieved so much.’ ”

More.

Photo: Tristram Kenton
Laura Evelyn in “Once Upon A Christmas” by Look Left Look Right in Covent Garden Piazza

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Celebrity and Something Lost

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

We watched the movie “Bill Cunningham New York” Saturday, and a more modest protagonist would be hard to find.

A fashion photographer who focuses less on the runway than on what people are wearing on the street, he knows all the fashionistas but lives in a rent-control apartment with a shared bathroom and thousands of photographs in file cabinets and prefers to eat at McDonald’s. He wears a series of simple blue workman’s jackets because the camera bumping against his chest wears them out. He traverses New York on a bicycle and is on his 29th (the others got stolen). He is not a paparazzi. In one scene in the documentary, he shows no interest in filming Catherine Deneuve at a glitterati event because “she wasn’t wearing anything interesting.” He is immune to the allure of celebrity.

Not too many people are immune to celebrity. Consider Baudelaire.

ArtsJournal.com asks if the 19th Century French poet was the first modern casualty of celebrity and points us to this essay by Stefany Anne Golberg at Drexel University’s online publication The Smart Set.

“The problem was this: Baudelaire wanted to shield his private life. So he made himself into a public entity. Yet, as he did, Baudelaire became the public persona he created. As he surrounded himself with layers of artificiality, the ‘real’ Baudelaire became hidden even from Baudelaire.” Read more.

Probably not a good idea to buy into one’s own image making.

 

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Creative Funding for the Arts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

A week or so ago, I wrote about CSA, community-supported arts, a concept that borrows from the community-supported agriculture movement. In case you missed it, here’s the post.

Another creative idea for supporting the arts is crowd funding. I learned about it from the Backstage blog by way of ArtsJournal.com.

” ‘I saw people believing in themselves enough to try and make money for their projects,’ said Monica Mirabile, a co-founder of the Copycat Theatre. Earlier this year, Mirabile was applying for grants for her Baltimore-based theater troupe when a friend suggested she look into Kickstarter, a ‘crowd-funding’ website that promotes artistic projects through social media and allows donors to
support fundraising campaigns with any amount of money they desire. Crowd-funding sites have grown in popularity over the last few years and continue to attract artists and benefactors. …

” ‘This is not the newest idea on the block. It’s very traditional. But we’ve become very used to the idea of someone in a boardroom giving us a check and we hand them a piece of art and cross our fingers. The longer history of art is actually one of patronage that involves the artist’s audience. …

” Users of crowd funding must summarize their projects and goals for potential donors, a process that can help artists sharpen the skills needed to pitch or develop those projects in the future. ‘I learned how to better articulate why I’m doing the project and my artwork and what we’re trying to gain,’ said Mirabile. ‘I made friends because, by promoting, I got to talk to different
people in my community and made connections.’ ”

Read more here. And if you try an approach like Kickstarter, would you let me know how it worked for you? Leave a comment.

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