Prime Minister Keir Starmer uses Labour Party conference speech to re-emphasise his aim to improve accessibility to arts and culture.
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(IN CROATIAN) Five minority theatres in Romania, Italy, Serbia, Albania and Croatia will combine to produce a play and a series of workshops in Spring 2018 using European Union funding.
The Metropolitan Opera cancelled a performance during the interval as a safety precaution after somebody sprinkled an unknown powder into the pit.
St Helens Libraries’ Cultural Hubs attracted over 2,000 votes to be named Best Arts Project for its work promoting health and wellbeing.
A study into the first year of the scheme has found it is having a consistent, positive impact on practice development, sectoral retention and mental well-being.
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The Bunkhouse, a 235-capacity music venue in Swansea city centre, has been purchased under a scheme run by the Music Venue Trust (MVT).
The venue is the third purchase made under the MVT’s #OwnOurVenues scheme by Music Venue Properties (MVP), an independent charitable society formed by MVT.
The Bunkhouse’s operators have signed a “cultural lease” with MVP, allowing it to use the building as long as it operates as a space for grassroots live music for the local community.
MVP has committed to offer the venue a rent reduction and contribute towards building repairs and insurance.
MVT says the venue will now have “permanent protected status”.
In 2023, MVP announced it had raised £2.3m through community shares, donations and loans.
The purchase of The Bunkhouse follows MVP’s acquisition in October 2023 of The Snug Coffee House in Greater Manchester and The Ferret in Preston in May 2024.
Arts Council England has agreed to consider setting up a gender advisory group.
The Royal Academy of Music has increased its target for a major fundraising campaign to £100m after surpassing its original goal of £60m.
The previous objective was set in 2022 to mark the academy’s bicentenary. The conservatoire says it has now exceeded this, raising more than £73m so far.
The new target is the largest in the institution’s history. Through philanthropic support received during the campaign so far, the academy has invested in areas such as scholarship funding, widening participation, access to artistic collaborators, endowed posts and upgrades to its facilities.
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, said: “Where philanthropy used to be the icing on the cake on top of significant public funding, we now know that it is core to our existence and success.
“I believe we can claim that we are taking the lead in showing how, in this country, our most significant cultural educational organisations can thrive in the here and now and build for the future.”
The National Theatre joins more than 100 venues, including Shakespeare’s Globe and The Old Vic, in signing up for the scheme guaranteeing a living wage for all staff.
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Research has found a “modest positive correlation” between higher numbers of street art murals and property prices.
An article published by the business Bromleys Art Supplies compared the number of street art murals to average house prices in 2024 across 28 UK cities, finding a correlation of 0.35.
“While other factors — not limited to healthcare facilities, employment opportunities and transport options — undoubtedly play more significant roles in influencing house prices,” the article says, “this trend underlines how important the local culture and arts scene is to prospective buyers”.
The research also found that Portsmouth was the UK city with the highest concentration of street art, with 7.9 artworks per square mile.
Belfast and Nottingham were in second and third position, with 6.8 and 6.5 artworks per square mile respectively.
The Managing Director of Harrods has apologised and stepped back from his role as a trustee of Royal Ballet and Opera amid an independent review following allegations of sexual misconduct by the department store’s former owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed.
Michael Ward, who has worked for Harrods since 2006 and for Al Fayed for four years, said he had “stepped back” from all his charity trustee positions while an independent review led by a non-executive committee of the department store’s board takes place.
The review will consider issues arising from several allegations of rape and sexual misconduct made against Fayed, who died last year at the age of 94.
Ward became a trustee of the Royal Ballet and Opera in 2022 and sat on the Finance and Commercial Committee. He was also appointed to the V&A Corporate Advisory Board in August 2020.
In a statement shared with The Guardian, Ward said that Harrods had failed employees by allowing Al Fayed to preside over “a toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation, fear of repercussion and sexual misconduct” but said he was “not aware of his criminality and abuse”.
A Royal Ballet and Opera spokesperson told Arts Professional: “We accepted Michael Ward’s resignation from our Board on 25 September. We'll be looking for a successor in due course.”
Whistleblowing disclosures relating to charities working in arts, culture, heritage and science have almost doubled in the past three years.
A new £1m digital modelling and analysis centre for the conservation and heritage science sector will open next year, it has been announced.
Heritage organisations will be able to bring artefacts to the centre based at Manchester Metropolitan University's PrintCity, where a range of imaging, scanning, and x-ray equipment will be used to pinpoint origins.
The centre is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the UKRI Infrastructure Fund. The university said it would be the first of its kind to provide a "one-stop shop" to access specialist techniques.
Ben Edwards, Reader in Heritage and Archaeology at Manchester Met and Centre Director, said: “We’re incredibly excited about the possibilities for this new facility.
"For the first time ever, we want to design a low-cost model for access where community groups, volunteer archaeological societies, and staff at small museums and galleries will be able to come and get a full picture of their object, artefact or historical remains."
The centre is expected to open in late 2025.
In a letter to the Treasury, the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre have also called for a £30m emergency capital investment pot to avoid venue closures.
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Rock band Oasis has said it will not use dynamic pricing when tickets go on sale for the US leg of its tour following widespread backlash over the cost of tickets.
The BBC reports that in a statement announcing dates in the US, Canada and Mexico, the group's managers said they wanted to "avoid a repeat of the issues" faced by fans in the UK and Ireland.
When the band's UK dates went on sale, some fans were charged more than £350 for tickets with an initial value of £150.
The UK's competition regulator has launched an investigation into whether Ticketmaster breached consumer protection law.
"It is widely accepted that dynamic pricing remains a useful tool to combat ticket touting and keep prices for a significant proportion of fans lower than the market rate and thus more affordable," the statement issued by the group's managers said.
"But, when unprecedented ticket demand (where the entire tour could be sold many times over at the moment tickets go on sale) is combined with technology that cannot cope with that demand, it becomes less effective and can lead to an unacceptable experience for fans."
Study finds evidence that cultural organisations are benefitting from variable pricing and experimenting with new approaches to ticketing and audience engagement.
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Suffolk County Council has opened a £500,000 Culture Project Fund after announcing plans to cut its core arts funding completely earlier this year.
Previously, nine organisations received regular funding from the council, but the new fund will be open to all arts and museum organisations, freelancers, charities, non-profits, community-focused companies and social enterprises based in the county.
Philip Faircloth-Mutton, the council's Cabinet Member for Environment, Communities, and Equality, said the aim of the fund offering smaller grants of £50,000, £15,000, and £1,500 was to create "happier, healthier, and stronger communities".
The council has previously said it was able to reverse its decision to end cultural funding after the last government unveiled an emergency £600m funding package to help local authorities with rising social care costs.
New figures from ACE showing an increase in Culture Recovery Fund fraud investigations as government begins search for Commissioner to recover public money lost to pandemic-related fraud.
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BBC’s Head of Arts and Classical Music TV, Suzy Klein, has countered suggestions that the broadcaster is not supporting its cultural broadcasting.
Speaking to The Guardian, Klein said there was a "strong and passionate commitment" to the arts at the BBC that she and her team are "defending...every single day of the week”.
Her comments follow recent criticism from David Dimbleby and Melvyn Bragg.
Dimbleby told the Guardian that no one at the BBC had “any appetite” for art, while Bragg said no one at the BBC had “the guts to fight back" when arts programmes are cut.
“I massively respect David and Melvyn, but I would push back very strongly against [those accusations]," said Klein.
"We do 28,000 hours of arts and culture content in a year, and almost 30 million people have watched our output in the past 12 months – which is nearly half the population of the UK. It’s hard to say we’re not making arts shows when you look at our programme.”
“I think the thing that is challenging in the current TV environment, which David and Melvyn will be speaking to, is that there is a deluge of content now, and such a fracturing of TV audiences, so it’s harder to find and locate things.
“Art doesn’t just mean one type of audience," she said, claiming that BBC makes more arts content than “all the public service broadcasters and streamers put together”.
Executive Director of Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance tells Scottish parliament that cultural organisations reliant on multi-year funding will soon be at risk of not being deemed a going concern.
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