Displaying items by tag: budget

It has been billed as one of the biggest architectural competitions of all time, an international contest open to practices both tiny and titanic, for a vast cultural complex for a world-famous institution, with a multi-million pound budget on a spectacular waterside site. It could mint the next Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry, and change the city’s skyline forever. But the race for who will design the Guggenheim Helsinki museum has spawned an unexpected side effect.

As the deadline for entries drew to a close this week, a counter-competition was launched as a riposte to what critics have branded a misguided vanity project, and a symbol of the Finnish capital selling out to an American brand.

The Italian minister for culture and tourism, Dario Franceschini, has announced a series of “revolutionary” reforms, which could mean that leading museums such as the Uffizi in Florence and the Accademia in Venice gain independence on a par with many of their European counterparts. Franceschini said: “The chronic lack of autonomy of Italian museums... greatly limits their potential.” He also aims to cut costs, streamline the administration and better integrate the work of his ministry.

The ministry was earmarked for staffing cuts after a €100m reduction in its budget from 2012 to 2013 under Franceschini's predecessor Massimo Bray. The latest review, presented by Franceschini last week, justifies 37 managerial redundancies in museums to reduce bureaucracy.

A rendering of the new Museum for African Art, with its soaring four-story wall, curved ceiling of rare Ghanaian wood and elaborate spiraling staircase, still sits on an easel in an unfinished concrete skeleton facing Central Park.

But those distinctive features and the $135 million budget that would have paid for them have now been shelved. After years of outsize promises and repeated postponements, officials now acknowledge that fund-raising travails have compelled them to scale back the grand design for the museum’s new home on Fifth Avenue.

The former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (Macro) says that the institution is facing a financial crisis. Alberta Campitelli, whose contract expired at the end of June, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that cuts by the city council mean the museum is at risk of closing. The municipal budget has been reduced from €350,000 in 2013 to €61,000 this year. “We literally have €5,000 a month [from the city],” Campitelli says. In April, the city’s culture councillor, Flavia Barca, announced funding cuts of between €10m and €15m for the capital’s culture and heritage sector.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami wants a $2.5 million boost in government support, with taxpayers set to cover a third of the museum’s budget next year.

Housed in a new $130 million waterfront headquarters built largely with government money, PAMM’s celebrated debut late last year also tripled the non-profit’s annual operating expenses, to $14 million from $5 million. Private dollars have not kept pace with the higher costs, leaving a gap that PAMM wants Miami-Dade to help close with a 60 percent increase in the museum’s operating subsidy from hotel taxes, according to interviews and budget documents.

German cultural commissioner Monika Grütters announced on Friday that the country would increase its cultural funding by €90 million for a total €1.3 billion ($1.76 billion) in allocated funds for 2014. The additional funding marks a seven percent increase over 2013.

Grütters said that the budgetary approval by the Bundestag secured, “a solid foundation for the development and creation of successful cultural-political [initiatives].” Among her major achievements since taking over the post from predecessor Bernd Neumann was the doubling of funds allocated to provenance research. The move followed the Gurlitt saga, which initiated a wealth of renewed public support for restitution efforts. Four million euros are now available annually to assist in such research.

The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews.

The anticipated budget matches what the library had originally suggested its previous plan — to insert a circulating branch at its main library at 42nd Street — might cost.

But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million, according to independent estimates they commissioned last June.

The European Parliament has decided to increase the culture budget for its 28 member nations by nine percent and will designate $1.97 billion for the Creative Europe program, which will help support artists, museums, performing arts institutions, and other cultural organizations. Creative Europe also plans to launch a new financial guarantee facility in 2016, which will enable small cultural and creative businesses to access up to 750 million euros in bank loans.

The goal of Creative Europe is to boost cultural and creative sectors to help stimulate economic growth, employment and innovation. Europe, which is in the midst of an economic crisis, has seen its overall budget cut down to 960 billion euros (from 975 billion euros) for the seven years between 2014 and 2020.

At a recent press conference, Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism, Sport, Media and Youth, said, “I am very pleased that we have achieved a 9 percent increase [for the program] despite the fact that the European budget in general has been decreased. We have to recognize that culture has an increasing value as a public good, especially in times of crisis, because it helps the social cohesion of our societies. Research clearly shows the strong growth potential of the cultural and creative sectors. They play a major role in Europe’s economy and account for about 4.5 percent of the EU GDP, employing about 8 million people. This is not to be underestimated.”

The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA, which was founded in 1975 by a group of locals, could relocate by 2016. In anticipation of the big move, museum officials are planning to increase the institution’s budget from $1.4 million to $1.7 million and are turning to individual donors and corporate and foundation bequests for help. In addition, the Danforth is planning a fundraising campaign to help make the relocation, which could run as much as $30 million, a reality.

The Danforth, which is home to 3,500 works of American art from the 18^th century to the present day, was given the go-ahead to purchase the Jonathan Maynard Building, a historic property more centrally located than its current home, last spring. The museum agreed to buy the building from the town of Framingham for $1.5 million.

The Danforth, which has been helmed by Katherine French since 2005, is planning to hire a director of development, a marketing manager, a controller, and a webmaster to help facilitate the move and ease the transition.

Less than two months after Richard Koshalek, the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park in Washington, D.C. resigned, Constance Caplan, the chair of the museum’s board, has followed suit. Caplan announced her resignation in a strongly worded letter on July 8, 2013; she is the third member to leave the board since early June. Caplan cited lack of transparency, trust, vision and good faith as her reasons for leaving. Koshelek listed similar reasons in his resignation letter.

Staff members have been losing faith in the Hirshhorn since it embarked on its doomed Seasonal Inflatable Structure project in 2009. The project was continually stalled due to rising construction costs and conflicting feelings about the structure’s purpose. It was ultimately abandoned after Koshalek’s resignation.

The original vision was to create a 150-foot-tall bubble that would connect the inside and outside of the Hirshhorn and create additional space for installations and performances. Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the bubble was expected to cost over $12.5 million to create and install. Previous fund-raising efforts brought in about $7.8 million. When it was first announced, the Bubble garnered national attention and was applauded for being highly innovated.