"Making a living from the arts?" The question-mark is eloquent in the title of last week's conference at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in Rathmines, which was organised with the European League of Institutes of Art and sponsored by the European Commission. Poverty and insecurity still dog the lives of many artists sidelined by the boom economy; for some, in fact, the boom, and the consequent hikes in accommodation and workspace costs, may have spelled doom.
The message which Dr Ellen Hazelkorn, director of DIT's Faculty of Applied Arts, brought to the conference was that things don't have to be so rough for artists. She focused on the need for third-level arts courses to change so that students can fully exploit the "huge opportunities" which exist in "design, multimedia, leisure software, performance, film, museums and traditional arts".
They need to be encouraged to develop flexibility, she said in conversation after the conference: "They may move across art forms continually - from theatre to film, to multi-media, to TV." Well, that's all right if those are your areas, but what is to become of the solitary painter or writer? These artists needed to "acquire the ability to be self-employed individuals", said Dr Hazelkorn. She argued strongly that students needed to have more contact with the business world as well as with practising artists, and said that well-designed internships should be developed.
She added that the courses on offer are "too vocationalist", and students who do not intend to become practising artists should feel they are learning valuable skills. "Creativity, imagination, the ability to work as part of a team - even if you don't want to be a violinist, you shouldn't feel a music degree is a waste of time." A report of the Dublin conference will be published and posted on the Web, and Dr Hazelkorn sees it as a lobbying tool. Colm O Briain, former special adviser to former minister Michael D. Higgins, will act as rapporteur from the Dublin event to a conference in Amsterdam next month, which will also gather findings from Helsinki and Madrid.
Reporting on the success of Wexford Festival Opera is almost boring. Yet again, it sold out completely. This year, even the lunchtimes, which were designed as an "impulse purchase", sold out before the festival opened. Chief executive Jerome Hynes must make other festival managers sick when he talks about his efforts to keep tickets available. "There's nothing worse," says Hynes, "than a club you can't join."
The proposed development of the Theatre Royal would increase audience capacity by 36 per cent, but the go-ahead from the Government on the required £20 million is still pending.
The cummerbunds crinkled, then, but it has to be said that some of the critics' noses did too. Hugh Canning of the Sunday Times described production standards as having reached "an all-time low" and blamed artistic director Luigi Ferrari's reliance on the scene-making department of the festival he used to run in Pesaro, Italy. Canning noted - as did others - that the men in Tchaikovsky's Orleanskaya Dyeva were running around in their stockinged feet, despite a programme credit for a Florentine shoe-maker, concluding: "It all sounds very Italian to me." Indeed, his lambasting of Zandonai's Conchita contained the complaint that the central couple, Monica di Siena and Renzo Zulian, "were two more provincial imports from Italy - coarse singers short on sexual charisma". Conchita was panned by nearly everyone, in fact, while the production standards of Orleanskaya Dyeva and Adam's Si J'etais Roi also came in for a lot of criticism, despite impressing musically.
Next year, the festival's 50th, has a more populist programme: Alessandro Stradella by Flotow, Dvorak's Jakobin, which is actually on the fringes of "the repertoire", and Sappho, by one of Wexford's all-time favourite composers, Massenet. And the Sunday Times can relax - there's not an Italian among them.
The closing date for getting in applications for revenue funding from the Arts Council for next year is next Wednesday, November 15th.
