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MONEY FOR GOD'S SAKE
The audience for Melbourne’s International Arts Festival continues to shrink, but the festival’s taxpayer funding is at an all-time high. Andrew Bolt reports:
Just five years ago, with Harold Mitchell as chairman and Jonathan Mills as director, the festival sold tickets worth $3.5 million.
By 2004, with a new chairman and Robyn Archer as director, the box office had fallen to $2 million. Last year, with Archer replaced by American Kristy Edmunds, it sank to just $1.6 million.
This year, with Edmunds still in charge, the box office target has reportedly been set at a paltry $1 million.
So much for voluntary contributions. How much is the festival hauling in from folks who don’t care to attend?
Edmunds now has a record $5.5 million a year of your taxes to play with, and another $400,000 from Melbourne City Council.
Read the piece to see exactly what that almost-$6 million bought.
“infantilises the whole experience’’
Translation: It’s childish to worry about money. We have people of the likes of Edmunds too. And how they squeal cultural doom if the money is cut off. These are the people who thinkl “nice” people are socialists and working for a living isdirtybelow them, only something that the taxpayer does. But they themselves deserve, are owed, a living off the governmetn teat.My itinery for Oz is now Sydney and
MelbourneDarwin.Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2006 10 20 at 02:48 PM • permalinkFrom the article: Another hyped show was simply a room with the lights switched off, and the festival opener had Japanese dancers prancing around a dull-eyed cow.
How I felt for the bewildered critics forced to make sense of it all, especially the one who had to explain Bloody Mess, in which “a nymphomaniac in a gorilla suit pelts all with popcorn’’.Well, they say when you subsidize something, you get more of it, so when you pay “artists” to parade their neuroses I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we get a veritable conga-line of the depraved.
“a nymphomaniac in a gorilla suit pelts all with popcorn’’
How do they know it was a nymphomaniac?
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 10 20 at 03:21 PM • permalinkHow do they know it was a nymphomaniac?
It wore a mini-skirt and had condoms on its fingers.
Posted by Gary from Jersey on 2006 10 20 at 03:33 PM • permalink#8 they were different shows. One show was just a room with the lights out. That’s it. A different show had a dull eyed cow. Yes, I’m serious.
Posted by daddy dave on 2006 10 20 at 04:07 PM • permalinkWhy do you have a problem with increasing public funding? They have to get the money somewhere and it obviously isn’t coming from the box office.
Call me when ticket sales fall to $100. I hate crowds.
Posted by tim maguire on 2006 10 20 at 05:35 PM • permalinkO/T Blairs law strikes again. Phat Phill sucks up to the Quaran with some of the softest questioning you have ever heard. I caught part of it on the way to the shops last night. 5 minutes had me gagging. “Women were important followers” etc. No mention of the 9 year old he married though.
Hoe the quaran follows on from the Bible and Torah as the final revelation. No mention of claiming Jesus faked his death though!The wartermellon has hit a new low. If anyone has the stomach to he this bit of self-fellating here is the link.
http://tinyurl.co.uk/cl56By the way he3 doesnt do transcripts, one of the only progs on the ABC that doesnt, so you have to listen to the old fraud.
I could only stomach 5 minutes someone else can try the rest.Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 10 20 at 07:15 PM • permalinkJust don’t remind them that most great artists in history, such as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Mozart, did it for money. Not saying they didn’t value their art, but there was a bottom line.
I don’t believe in arts subsidies, period. In Australia, that probably means my kind of music would suffer. So be it. I don’t expect anyone to pay for something they find boring, incomprehensible or snobbish, no matter how much I think of it otherwise.
How’d they know they were really Japanese? Koreans work for half the price. Can’t use Norks, though, they’d have just eaten the cow…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 10 20 at 08:04 PM • permalinkRight here, ladies and gentlemen, is a shining example of the difference between private enterprise, where failure means drowning, versus public service mentality where failure simply means reshuffling and propping up.
If they had to rely solely or predominantly on their own success, for example as Kenny did, they would try a lot harder. As it stands, there is simply no motivation. As is the case in jobs (e.g. teaching and much of the public sector) where nothing you do will see you fired but merely turning up may see you promoted.
Ugh.
I’d like to see if a private group in Melbourne could put a festival together that people would pay to see. That these modern day wanker-fests were once paying propositions suggests that it might be worth trying. Can you imagine the heads of these soft-money socialists exploding if they had to compete against a privately funded, popular and profitable arts festival?
Posted by AlburyShifton on 2006 10 20 at 10:09 PM • permalinkBolt is 100% right about the absurdity of these charades passing as art, but the subsidy of $5.5M is small change. It would be much better to direct this money towards ticket prices than to the artists. Bolt has argued this forcefully before.
If you are looking for real subsidies, try the Commonwealth Games. These cost Victorian taxpayers a net $691M. That means that each and every ticket sold to the Games was subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of over $500.
Next year they should forget the plays and just buy every Melburnian a notepad and some textas…
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 10 21 at 02:09 AM • permalinkSo I’m not the only person in the world who remembers that song.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 10 21 at 10:58 PM • permalink
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I saw this on Bolta’s blog yesterday morning - bless him he never gives up the fight against this kind of taxpayer funded elitist deconstructed post- modern whatever crap
The pathetic Bracks Government presides over a water crisis in Melbourne yet sees fit to shovel bucketloads of money to this so called festival - which most Melburnians haave rightly voted with their feet and hard earned $$$ to ignore
Why do people keep voting in such incompetents?