Economic Impact of the Arts in Ireland

via The Irish TImes

DEIRDRE FALVEY Arts Editor

THE ARTS sector is worth €782 million a year to the economy and employs 26,519 people, research released yesterday has found.

Assessment of Economic Impact of the Arts in Ireland, a report by Indecon Economic Consultants, commissioned by the Arts Council and written by economist Dr Alan Gray, suggests the economic impact of the arts may be larger than generally perceived.

“Previous figures bandied about significantly have overestimated the economic impact of the arts sector,” Mr Gray said at a briefing on the report yesterday. Because they overstated the economic impact of the arts they were not taken seriously and “led economists and policymakers to believe the arts had no impact or minimal impact on the economy.”

But this Indecon report “shows the arts sector does have significant economic impact”.

Some €76 million of Arts Council funding to organisations in Ireland supports more than 3,000 jobs, generates €192 million in turnover, and €54 million of it returns directly to the exchequer in taxes, the report found.

Arts Council chairwoman Pat Moylan said: “At last we can back up what we have known by instinct – the Arts Council is making a very significant contribution to the Irish economy, and can help to generate hundreds more jobs right now, for a proportionately small extra investment.”

Dr Gray said the research was rigorous and independent and the analysis showed the arts and cultural sectors had a significant economic impact. “While I do not believe that the arts should be evaluated solely on economic grounds, it is clear the sector is an important and labour-intensive one. It also makes a significant contribution to exchequer revenues.”

March for the Arts (Cork, November 15th)

MARCH FOR THE ARTS

Arts workers throughout the city and county are coming together to ensure the place of the arts in our country’s recovery, in a March For The Arts at 2pm on Saturday 14 November beginning at Daunt Square. Cork artists and arts workers are proud of their contribution to Cork’s designation in the Lonely Planet Best of 2010 Guide as one of the top ten cities in the world to visit and the significance that this has had to the local economy.

At a meeting in the Everyman Palace Theatre on the 29^th of October, arts workers in Cork came together to discuss what they could do locally to voice their support for the National Campaign for  the Arts (www.ncfa.ie).

The National Campaign for the Arts asserts the fundamental importance of the arts to economic recovery and calls for:

1.       Retention of Culture Ireland, the agency for the promotion of Irish arts worldwide.

2.       Retention of The Irish Film Board, development agency of the Irish film industry.

3.       Maintenance of existing levels of funding to the Arts Council.

4.       Retention of the artists’ income tax exemption scheme.

5.       Commitment to retain the arts portfolio at cabinet as part of a senior ministerial portfolio.

There was a very strong feeling at the meeting that, as well as contacting TDs and local representatives to make the case for the arts, a public action of sorts needed to be made, not only by arts workers, but by the general public who are supporters of the arts and who are concerned about the effects of cuts to arts funding. Cork artists and arts workers are proud of their contribution to Cork’s designation in the Lonely Planet Best of 2010 Guide as one of the top ten cities in the world to visit and the significance that this has had to the local economy. It is hoped that with the maintenance of current levels of Arts Council funding, the arts in Cork will continue to draw visitors to the area and that Cork can capitalise on the spending power of these visitors..

So on Saturday November 14^th, all concerned parties will gather at Daunt Square and march down Patrick’s Street and gather again at Emmet Place. The main objectives are to raise awareness and inform people of what’s at stake for the Arts in the forthcoming budget and to ask people to add their signatures to an online petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/ncfa/petition.html) in support of the cause.

For more information on the march, visit www.corkarts.org.

An extra special event will take place at 1.30pm, just before the march – for more information on how to be involved, email letmrblueskyin@gmail.com.

–
Julie Kelleher
0863774104
corkartsworkers@gmail.com
http://corkarts.org

Typographic Utopias

Société Réaliste: Hexatopia, betűkészlet, 2009

TYPOPASS-CRITICAL DESIGN AND CONCEPTUAL TYPOGRAPHY at Platán Gallery, Budapest. Organized by Dorottya Gallery and tranzit. hu with the collaboration of the Polish Institute.

How does critical design emerge, the attempt to counter consumer culture with a social consciousness with the intention not only to serve customers but also to shape visual culture, even the whole of culture and society? The project focuses on typography, a visual language that can be interpreted both in the field of art and design. The exhibition presents the historical and contemporary projects and publications from the boundary of design and the visual arts in three groups: Typographic Utopias, Anti- and Parallel Design, Subversive Design.

Amateur Hour: Cake Wrecks

This week's featured website is Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes
go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong.



Cake Wrecks on Facebook
Amateur Hour is a showcase for exciting new learning, skills,
entertainment and public actions. Submissions in any form welcome
to selfinterestandsympathy@ gmail.com.

Unofficial Culture (Istanbul)

This visit to Istanbul coincided with the Istanbul Bienal and was funded through the European Commission project, Rhyzom, with partners Agency (UK), aaa (France), Public Works (UK), PS2 (Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland). The field trip was to visit our Turkish partners, the Cultural Agencies project, curated by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philip Misselwitz and Oda Projesi:

The project fosters an intensive exchange between international students, artists, curators, architects, and Istanbul’s cultural institutions as well as local communities in order to mutually develop initiatives for the future of these peripheries.

An interdisciplinary project by artists, architects, and students on the topics of city planning and public space in Istanbul’s peripheries. An initiative of the Allianz Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the Platform Garanti & Garanti Gallery (Istanbul), the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts (Istanbul), and the Städelschule (Frankfurt).

Amateur Hour: Amateurs exhibition at Wattis, California

For the Amateur Hour archive, the exhibition Amateurs at CCA Wattis,
Centre for Contemporary Art, California:

‘Against the background of an increasingly professionalized art world, Amateurs will be the first major exhibition to survey recent artworks in which amateurism is embraced as a critical aesthetic strategy and a mode of production. Favored by conceptual artists and earlier by modernist vanguards, an aesthetic of amateurism has long served as a means for deflating models of academic and market-driven art.

Amateurs will develop an exhibition that challenges the mainstream of contemporary art by bringing together artists who elaborate on this tradition, embracing amateurism as a means for questioning basic assumptions about authorship, expertise, the relationship between artist and audience, and the contingency of cultural values. Ultimately, the exhibition will provoke much-needed reflection on the history of this tendency, and its continuing value in challenging the limitations of professionalized art practices.’

Amateurs was curated by Ralph Rugoff, former director of the Wattis Institute and current director of the Hayward Gallery at the South Bank Centre in London. It was be accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalog with essays by Rugoff and the scholar John Roberts.

Amateur Hour is a showcase for exciting new learning, skills,
entertainment and public actions. Submissions in any form welcome
to selfinterestandsympathy@ gmail.com.

Istanbul Bienal (Translator’s Box)

Translator's Box (in the arch) at ex-Platform Garanti building,
Istanbul.

Porto/ Utopian

Images: ruined shopping mall outside the university; pyrite
[fool's gold] at the university geology museum.
Photographs by/ copyright Sarah Browne, with the kind
co-operation of the Utopian Studies Society.

10th International conference of the Utopian Studies Society,
Europe, at the University of Porto, Portugal, July 2009.

Heartland

via eflux:
Smart Museum of Art presents Heartland
The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art presents Heartland, a new exhibition that examines innovative forms of artistic creation taking place in the geographic center of the United States. Organized by the Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum, the exhibition looks at a diverse assembly of artists who are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways.

On view from October 1, 2009 to January 17, 2010, Heartland features site-specific installations and performances as well as drawing, photography, and video by artists and artist groups who are working in—and in response to—Detroit, Kansas City, and other cities and rural communities across the region. Together with an extensive series of programs and lectures, Heartland challenges our understandings of place, community, and the role of contemporary art in our changing world.

some things I didn’t know or expect (thank you J)

A good few months ago now, my laptop went to sleep and never woke up
again. My reliable, pre-Vista Vaio was no longer with me, and I thought
with some dread and fascination about crossing over to the white side,
Edenic commodity fetishism and all.

However I've been lucky enough to do this by baby steps, effectively
putting off the decision indefinitely by borrowing a friend's old,
discarded Mac. No need to make definitive decisions involving what
feels like learning another language, and paying through the
(shiny white/ matt aluminium) nose for it to boot.
I can procrastinate with a free trial first.

What's been so surprising about this is how pleasant it has been to
borrow a friend's discarded mental environment. I don't mean the
nosey impulse to comb through her hard drive: there is nothing there
and I don't want there to be. But it's oddly comforting to inherit
a screensaver image (which I haven't changed, even though I find it
hard on the eyes), a search history, a few oddments of music and an
eclectic set of favourite weblinks, organised into intriguing
subheadings (Public Space/ rainbow/ Speech/ paris/ difference engine).
It reminds me of swapping shoes with my best friend for the day when
I was a kid.