Art Attack: Luminato set to lose $3.5 million in funding
Art Attack: Luminato set to lose $3.5 million in funding
On Tuesday, the provincial government handed down its proposed budget, and the arts received some pretty heavy blows. The Luminato festival, which was expecting to receive $4 million next year and $4.5 million in 2014, will see that funding cut by $3.5 million over the next two years. Also targeted were the AGO, the ROM, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, all of which are expected to lose one per cent of funding in 2012 and two per cent in 2013. Remember when art mattered? It apparently doesn’t anymore (or at least it matters one or two per cent less than it did last year).
(Images: chopping block, Mike Fernwood; logo, Luminato)
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(Images: chopping block, Mike Fernwood; logo, Luminato)){kind=link}
I believe you mean one or two percentage points less.
Is Luminato bringing tourists? The programming is nowhere near good enough to justify that budget for the sake of art: mostly branding of existing events, lame imports, “tributes” to mainstream recording artists and lots of backslapping cocktail parties. If it doesn’t turn a net profit for the city, axe it & give a boost to the Ontario Arts Council.
Re: the Luminato Festival cut. It seems there are some short memories as a quick scan of public documents will remind people of the most fortunate and likely unprecedented levels of provincial funding this festival has received in a few short years. Luminato received $1 million start-up funding in 2005-06, $15 million in 2008, and another $15 million commitment in 2011. That’s $31 million since 2005. It is to this last $15 million cash infusion that the Ontario Government has pulled back $3.5 million. The total contribution will still surpass $27.5 million, a truly formidable number. Potentially, there is merely some “shifting” going on here as Ontario gears up and provides substantial capital investments for the Toronto 2015 Pan-American Games, which is also supposed to include a significant cultural component. (With ties to Luminato to become more evident down the road, perhaps?) It is not too much to expect this festival to have achieved more self-sustainability by now. A quick scan of its publicly available charitable filing on Revenue Canada’s charities listing shows that Luminato spent over $2.2 million on compensation last year, including the CEO’s salary at over $350,000.